Where I Watched It: Apple VOD (iTunes)

English Audio Description Provided By The Media Access Group

Narrated By: Ingir Tudor

Cast: Paul Dañó, Seth Rogen, America Ferrera, Shailene Woodley, Anthony Ramos, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Sebastian Stan, Dane DeHaan, and Olivia Thirlby.

Written By: Lauren Shukart-Blum

Directed By: Craig Gillespie

The immediate and obvious comparison that I’m sure comes to everyone’s mind is The Big Short. Take the housing collapse of 2008, expose it, and explain it so anyone in the audience can understand the ins and outs. It’s one of the reasons The big Short did so well with audiences and critics. Dumb Money has had a harder road, because despite feeling very much like the same film, it doesn’t deliver the same results, and likely the audience still has no idea what happened. Of course, there are a bunch of other documentaries on the GameStop scandal that rocked the pandemic. It all just depends on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go.

Dumb Money is very much an ensemble film, and trying to pinpoint a lead character is really almost unfair to Paul Dañó. He’s being called the lead for all intents and purposes, but that’s just because he’s representing the financial YouTuber who got people into this GameStop insanity to begin with.The film actually invests itself in so many other storylines, from an actual GameStop employee (Ramos) to a nurse who needs the money (Ferrera) not to mention Wall Street (represented by several characters including Rogen and Offerman), that the pinball bouncing around that is the narrative thread gets a little lost. Even with The Big Short, you had multiple story lines, yet they all seemed to take similar importance. Christian Bale’s contribution didn’t necessarily mean more to the film than the story Steve carell’s character was telling. Here, it’s a lot of people gambling on GameStop, and we don’t have the time.

because of the broad and massive range of the ensemble, this is why I feel like the main interesting learning about how the sausage got made gets murky. We have to check in on the college students. We have to track Dano’s brother. The movie does an interesting job of showing us the values at the beginning, and we can see how they grow, and how Wall Street reacts, but this film does not give Dañó enough space to really show what he can do. Some of it is funny, but like the Big Short, some of it is troubling. Not everything works out for everyone, and someone always gets hurt. And it wasn’t just the Wall Street gang.

The script is solid, but the casting is important. This many talented people is what keeps a really bogged down film the spark. These are some of the top actors in the game, with all of them having fallen short of an Oscar nomination in the past, and most of them showing here why they will find their way back into that conversation. They do a lot with very little screen time.

This is an audio description track I’m mostly going to give a giant pass on. This is a very dialogue heavy film, and there’s not much the team at media Access Group can do about that. however, I did like that since Gillespie is fond of throwing text onto the screen, we did get all those numbers he keeps throwing at us. It’s important to know where people began, and see where they ended. Did they win big? Just a little bit? Or did they lose everything?

I wanted this to be so much better. it was actually probably in my top 20 films I was most anticipating, because the cast is terrific, and I had high hopes this would be another the big Short. It’s not, and it misses that mark, but it still is a testament to gathering all the right people on screen and giving them the space to deliver memorable work.

Final Grade: B-