Strange film, 2hrs
and 10mins long and it's about the 2008 financial crash, yet it still manages
to be entertaining and swift moving.
Aside from Brad
Pitt's vanity role, there's very few likable characters. The main players are a
bunch of people who saw the crash coming, claim it's the work of criminal
financial institutions who use the taxpayer's (especially those on a lower income)
money as the bricks to build their castles of fiscal immorality.
All very true and
fair enough.
However, those same
people all then take rich people's money to invest in the probability of a
global economic fuck-up, and make gargantuan profits when it happens, making
themselves, and the wealthy, a lot of money from everyone else losing all of
theirs. These people are framed within the plot as the rogueish, plucky
underdogs of the financial world, when all they're doing is playing the same
game as those they claim to despise, but a little more astutely.
So the conscience the
film tries to project feels false as it still comes across as a prayer in the
temple of money.
That said, the final
five minutes are quietly powerful. Steve Carrell's character reflects on the
banking world crashing and says along the lines of "It'll be the same as it's always been in
times of economic hardship, immigrants and the poor will take all the blame",
and there follows a voiceover describing how rather than the crash tethering
the excesses of the financial world, it has in fact given them more freedom
than ever.
Yeah, pretty much
nailed it there.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/
7.5/10
Perkin.
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