Ryan Gosling, as a fictional character, explains directly to the audience what the others are doing, and Brad Pitt is a retired paranoiac and elder statesman of finance who helps provide a crucial connection for a pair of young traders working on their own bet against the mortgage-backed bonds.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a mildly autistic one-eyed fund manager in California who plowed through the data to prove that many bonds consisting of packages of bad mortgages were doomed Steve Carell is an arrogant anger-management case, Mark Baum (based on Steve Eisman), who bet against the same kinds of bonds in New York. The main purpose of the film seems to be to encourage the actors to go bonkers playing up the eccentricities of their unfortunately coifed characters.

You might as well reduce Einstein to finger puppets. Things get more tangled as the movie goes on: Based on Michael Lewis’ rightly acclaimed book, about the traders who foresaw a collapse in mortgages that would lead to a bank crisis and a nationwide financial panic in 2008, the big-screen version is a film without an audience.Īs a polysyllabic spree of technical verbiage (“collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps”), it’s far too dry for the “Talladega Nights” crowd, to name one of the many silly Will Ferrell comedies directed by Adam McKay, this film’s co-writer and director.īut its self-consciously goofy interludes (Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain, all playing themselves, make guest shots to explain the crisis using juvenile comic metaphors) render the film unbearably puerile to those who actually know or care about how Wall Street works. Did Darth Vader ever have to stop to explain what a “star” or a “war” was? Rated R (profanity, nudity, sexuality).Įarly in “The Big Short,” when someone pauses to tell the audience what a “short” is, you know the movie is confused about who it’s talking to.

The big short showing