The Big Short 2015
I have enjoyed seeing some other financial movies like Too Big To Fail. Also, the movie is based on a book by Michael Lewis who also wrote a great series of articles about the global financial meltdown. It doesn’t hurt that I really liked Moneyball, another movie based on a Michael Lewis book, which also starred Brad Pitt. So while I was really looking forward to this film, I don’t think The Big Short is quite up to those others. It has a good cast, but the characters are a little too offbeat and played maybe a little too simply. The story centers around several groups of small-time fund managers who independently all figure out the housing market is about to go bust and they can make a ton of money by shorting mortgage-backed securities, which they have realized have much more risk than people realize. The problem with shorting something is you are still part of the market and even if you think Pets.com is valueless, if you short it and people keep believing it is worth something, you can lose all your money. Also, they all rail against the complexity and opaqueness of Wall Street trading, but they create a new type of derivative in order to execute their bet against the housing market. It isn’t overly preachy, but it isn’t that fun to watch either. Even once their bets pay off and they make money, they are doing so only at the expense of the entire economy going in the tank and millions of people suffering. And they wind up blaming the bankers, complaining that none of them went to jail, but the movie might have been better if it just stuck to the story of these few guys and left the big picture alone. It’s a good story, but hard to make into a good movie, so I have to give it a B.
Written: 02 Jan 2016