Review of The Big Short (2015) by Ben T — 27 Mar 2016

The Big Short is a film set between 2005 - 2008 that focuses on the housing crisis and Wall Street crash. The film stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, a string of cameos and is directed by Anchorman director Adam McKay.

I'm not going to get into the story of this film as its very complicated and fairly hard to follow and to be fair I don't want to mess it up. This film has great acting, Christian Bale gives a great performance, his character is very relaxed and casual and Bale plays him fantastically.

Steve Carell I thought gave the best performance of the movie. He plays a very angry character and when he first arrived I thought him being angry was gonna be his only character trait but he's actually a more deep and emotional character who was very likeable as you see he really does care about this situation and not about profiting off the crisis.

Ryan Gosling plays a very suave and playboy type character and he's really good. His character is very similar to the one he played in Crazy Stupid Love which was very entertaining. Brad Pitt is only playing a supporting role and while he's really good he wasn't in it as much as I was expecting him too.

The supporting actors are all great, especially all the actors who play Steve Carell's team. There are also lots of celebrity cameos like Margot Robbie who explain complicated banking details for the audience and that's very funny and also does help with the story.

This film is really well directed by Adam McKay who despite having mostly directed comedies did a fantastic job directing. This is not an easy story to tell but McKay brilliantly portrayed it here and it never got to a point where I was completely lost.

The writing here is also great, this film is very funny but we also get the details very cleverly explained to us in unique ways. The editing here is also really good, there are lots of quick cuts which could turn people off but I got used to it and I really enjoyed the style here.

This film is also extremely entertaining, there are lots of funny moments and I really enjoyed this movie. I absolutely loved the ending, it was quite dramatic and very sad yet it wasn't too much of a downer.

As for problems I don't have many, for example this film is made to look very unprofessional, with crash zooms, the camera constantly moving around and lots of quick cuts. Also sometimes the pacing is quite slow in areas but that's it.

The Big Short isn't perfect but is a very entertaining, very well acted and extremely well directed movie. It has flaws and is on the cusp of being great but I thought this was a really good movie.

B+.