Dumb Mon­ey review – mild­ly enter­tain­ing eco­nom­ics 101

After com­ing to promi­nence with the lov­able Ryan Gosling indie from 2007, Lars and the Real Girl, Aus­tralian film­mak­er Craig Gille­spie seems to have found his niche with­in Hol­ly­wood, cre­at­ing ripped-from-the-head­lines drame­dies about under­dogs and the unfair­ly vil­lainised. First there was Mil­lion Dol­lar Arm, about sports agent JB Bernstein’s search for base­ball great­ness, then I, Tonya, his take on infa­mous ice skater Tonya Hard­ing (which net­ted Mar­got Rob­bie her first Oscar nom­i­na­tion). In 2022 he had a stint in tele­vi­sion with Pam & Tom­my (about the Pamela Ander­son and Tom­my Lee sex tape scan­dal) and Mike (about Mike Tyson). There was also Cruel­la, his live-action take on the vil­lain­ess from 101 Dal­ma­tians, but the less said about that the better.

But Gille­spie takes on a much more con­tem­po­rary real-life sto­ry in Dumb Mon­ey: the GameStop short squeeze of Jan­u­ary 2021, when a group of ama­teur investors on Red­dit inad­ver­tent­ly went to war with Wall Street over the price of shares for a stag­nat­ing video game retail­er. To explain the intri­ca­cies of what a short stop is and why this par­tic­u­lar inci­dent was sig­nif­i­cant would take up the rest of this page. Suf­fice to say it was a David vs Goliath finan­cial moment – if David was a guy in Mass­a­chu­setts post­ing cat memes and Goliath was a Rich­er than Croe­sus banker decid­ing where to put his fifth swim­ming pool.

The affa­ble Paul Dano takes on a more like­able role than he’s usu­al­ly afford­ed as the finan­cial analyst/​hobby stock mar­keter Kei­th Gill, who was known with­in the r/​wallstreetbets com­mu­ni­ty for his videos about invest­ing and under­val­ued stock. Among his view­ers are nurse Jen­nifer Camp­bell (Amer­i­ca Fer­rera), GameStop employ­ee Mar­cus (Antho­ny Ramos) and col­lege stu­dents Har­mo­ny (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Her­rold) who invest in GameStop at Gill’s behest.

Fac­ing off against them are the might of Wall Street: wealth man­age­ment com­pa­ny chief invest­ment offi­cer Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and hedge fund man­agers Ken­neth C Grif­fin (Nick Offer­man) and Steve Cohen (Vin­cent D’Onofrio). This results in a film with a lot of mov­ing parts, and while this might be in the pur­suit of show­ing that the GameStop short squeeze was a team effort, it results in a nar­ra­tive splin­ter­ing where no char­ac­ter except Gill real­ly feels par­tic­u­lar­ly compelling.

Aside from this, the film owes a rather obvi­ous debt to Adam McKay’s The Big Short, which arguably did the same thing – point out that when it comes to cap­i­tal­ism, the house always wins – eight years ear­li­er. The comedic beats feel the same, and while the dat­ed inter­net humour and juve­nile bandy­ing of slurs might be accu­rate, it’s not exact­ly cin­e­mat­ic. This is a mild­ly enter­tain­ing film that does a decent job of explain­ing bog­gling finan­cial con­cepts, but it’s dif­fi­cult to see why exact­ly Gille­spie (along with screen­writ­ers Lau­ren Schuk­er Blum and Rebec­ca Ange­lo) felt com­pelled to tell the sto­ry in this for­mat. A doc­u­men­tary might have offered more of an insight into the unique­ly mas­cu­line form of psy­chopa­thy that pros­pers on Wall Street and Red­dit alike.