Review: Dumb Money

Dumb Money
Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Craig Gillespie / Trailer

Well, it's nice to see that the department at Sony in charge of greenlighting True-Story™, fast-cut, mumbled-dialogue, quirky, yellow-poster, current affairs, underdog dramatisations is largely weathering the storm currently affecting the rest of the movie industry.

This is one of those pieces that's usually dropped in January as quasi awards-bait (but that aforementioned storm means it's hitting screens now to make up for nothing else being ready), usually based on a New York Times article or a factual book (or a New York Times article which led to a factual book), in which mainstream entertainment actors get to play in the frowny grown-ups sandpit, and convince us all that they're worth the sensible plaudits by doing so. Dumb Money centres around the Gamestop stock-debacle of 2021, and is populated by players who are either perpetually furious, gormless or both at the same time. And because these characters are based to varying levels on Real People™, director Craig Gillespie gets carte blanche in portraying them as either too dull for dramatisation or too pantomime for documentary. So this is very much like real life in that we can't have nice things. Is it dumb? No. But is it an interesting cinematic distillation of a superficially complex subject, boiled down to its base elements to shine insight onto the fallibility of human behaviour which caused the furore and the plucky spirit of those who rode out the storm and stuck it to The Man? Also no.

Dumb Money is for people who didn't manage to take in what was on the news 18 months earlier, and use their escapist downtime to watch movies about it all instead*¹. If that's you, enjoy.

*¹ Seriously, there were 2 (two) separate ads for vitamin supplements before the trailers, so at least the distributors know that the only people watching this movie are firmly middle-aged... ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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