Review of Too Big to Fail (2011) by Jason D — 27 Dec 2014

It's a decent, not-great TV movie. The cast is solid but the script is pretty lazy. Taken in a disinterested macro view, the movie is just a bunch of scenes of suits on cell phones and in board rooms telling each other things are worse than they said last time, and begging people to give other people money.

Unlike, say, a documentary of the financial crisis, you don't get much in the way of a technical explanation and the actual problem is discussed very superficially. You do feel for Paulson as he is just bombarded by a demented whack-a-mole game that just keeps getting more and more nightmarish with each hit of the mallet.

This company is short 15 billion. Wow, that sucks. Actually 70 billion. Actually 180 billion. Actually 780 billion. Actually all of them and it's going to be worse than the Great Depression. You wonder where was the help for Paulson from the administration, you wonder how nobody in congress even knew what was going on, you wonder why they deal with every problem in an ungodly informal arrangement between chums.

But most of the characters outside of Paulson are just stock, type cast, and mailed-in performances, and there isn't that much of a dramatic arc except the arc of history, which is a tension build and a resolution.

That's fine with me but not with a lot of people.That the characters do not change is a criticism a script analyst would give of this movie. It deals with present day figures so the acting looks bad throughout with the exception of Hurt as Paulson.

All in all, if you were only marginally interested in watching this movie as entertainment and you don't care about the financial crisis, you shouldn't watch this movie. And you might not appreciate it much if you are an expert on the financial crisis.

This movie really appeals only to the people in between those two groups.