Written by: Charles Randolph and Adam McKay (screenplay), Michael Lewis (book)
Directed by: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling
Rated: R
Plot:
Investment banker Michael Burry (Christian Bale) discovers a housing bubble and bets against mortgage bonds, traditionally one of the safest bonds. Three other outsiders follow his lead. They're poised to get rich when the global economy crumbles. This is based on a true story, and the housing bubble did in fact burst.
Verdict:
The Big Short is an incredible education in the economic collapse, the housing market, and who's at fault. .It's an underdog story, but winning means a collapse in the economy so it's hard to root for the protagonists. They're taking advantage to get rich, which isn't much different from the banks they are targeting. The core story is excellent, but there are a few too many cutaways to stock footage and even a rap video. The movie often feels like part documentary, but those additions are unnecessary. The cutaway celebrity explanations are distracting and repetitive. I easily understood what was going on and didn't need a reductive explanation. It's very smart. It's part absurdist humor, investigative exploration, and fraud expose. It tackles the prediction and downfall from multiple angles, providing a clear and comprehensive picture of what happened. It's going to be a movie that's a sign of the times and an expose on what happened.
Watch it.
Review:
Gosling gives a great opener that's part history of banking and part why the housing bubble burst. Two minutes in I know why the housing market collapsed. A banker bundled mortgages to sell them for big profit. When you run out of good ones, you start bundling bad ones. It's a slick explanation.
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| The Big Short - It's what you know for sure that gets you in trouble. |
The writing is very good. The financial crisis is handled with levity. Celebrity cameos explain concepts, but I found it repetitive. Frequent cutaways to stock footage and a hip hop sound track take the punch away from the seriousness of the issue, but it also makes it feel unrefined.
I do like how the movie tells us when it's distorting the facts or embellishing.
The movie does a great job of introducing characters and juggling main and side characters. Bale as Michael Burry is impeccable. I knew right away this was going to be a standout performance from him.
Everyone thinks Burry is crazy to bet against mortgage bonds, but they're happy to take his money. Burry was a a former medical doctor who decided to try investing and succeeded. If he's right, and he's sure he is, he's sitting on a huge payday. No one believes him despite how well he's done. The other characters in the movie discover Burry's idea and research instead of dismissing it like everyone else in the world.
The film jumps two years, when mortgage bonds should start to fail. The protagonists are baffled that mortgage bond ratings haven't decreased. The game is rigged. Ignorance is running rampant. The SCC isn't even investigating. S&P who rates the loans won't decrease the rating because they would lose business.
The facts are staggering. On a 50 million mortgage bond, a billion is bet against it. Banks were shorting bonds and financing that by selling shorts of triple A loans. Even the triple A loans defaulted. The end is the most enraging part. Homeowners are on the street, mortgage brokers are looking for work, but the banks, who orchestrated this mess, got bailouts and gave themselves bonuses, blaming everyone else. Only one banker went to jail, and he did nothing the big banks hadn't done. The banks went back to the same tactics. Michael Burry contacted the government to discuss his prediction of the failure and was never contacted. The economy crumbled and nobody cared. To ask questions, would reveal the complete failure of the governing bodies from top to bottom.
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