Dumb Money is a biographical dramedy about the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. Keith Gill(Paul Dano) is a financial advisor and recreational youtuber who makes vids about GameStop stock which he has heavily invested in. Other retail traders connected through Reddit bring on the short squeeze in opposition to various hedge funds who have shorted GameStop.
The cast is stacked with talent and celebs, to run down a few- Dano is wonderfully gentle and moral as Gill, Sebastian Stan and Vincent D'Onofrio(as rich start up guy and rich hedge fund guy respectively) both give really specific funny performances. But the rest don't have much to do, this isn't a movie about people this is a movie, ultimately, about the stock market and it has little interest in actual humanity. The rest of the cast come and go through scenes but have little in the way of actual dimension or personality(no fault of the actors).
Sharply made with lots of time jumps, quick edits, and text on screen - The Big Short meets the The Social Network but derivative of those and equally focused not on people or narrative but recent historic financial instances. It's a bizarre focus to make a feature about and shows, along with the recent glut of movies about products(Air, Blackberry, The Beanie Bubble) that Hollywood is adrift, aimless, when it comes to understanding what we, regular folks, want to watch. This movie is fine, Dano's pretty great in it actually, but this isn't entertaining enough or interesting or moving enough to be really great. The attempted commentary on class is, quite frankly, insulting. It's much more interested in getting the titular dumb money to get involved in the stock market than telling a compelling story about the working or middle class. All these corporate movies are fine but they're never going to make a splash, they are never going to be hits because they've forgotten what good stories(and therefore good films) are about. People.
An inoffensive waste of time and talent.
Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.
Stream It.
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