"The Big Short" is long on all the gory details and lotsa fast-paced entertainment!

Rating: 9/10 (22 May 2016)

I had heard that Director Adam McKay ("Anchorman", "Anchorman 2") takes the colossally complicated details of the catastrophic 2007 U.S. housing crash and parcels out the grim details to the audience of his extraordinary film "The Big Short" in unusually palatable ways. As soon as I saw the fetching Margot Robbie explaining a portion of these perplexing particulars while enjoying a bubble bath and drinking champagne served from a (no doubt most grateful) butler, McKay had me eating up what he was serving with just a big ass appreciative spoon!
"The Big Short" is a two-hour-plus dissection of and dissertation on greed and unspeakable institutional incompetence and arrogance that succeeds in never once feeling as if it is dragging on. Not an easy trick to pull off. And all credit for doing so, and in stunningly spectacular fashion, goes to McKay's snappy style and breakneck pace working in seamless tandem with flawless ensemble performances from the superstar stable of Bale, Carell, Gosling and Pitt. Each actor absolutely nails their real-life character here as they collectively make a financial killing at the expense of the American homeowner and right under the clueless upturned noses of the nation's banking and mortgage industries along with a feeble federal government.
Any film that can (and almost without realizing it is happening) have you veritably rooting for these self-serving guys who see themselves as merely taking advantage of an insidiously flawed system whose pompous proprietors are fast asleep at the wheel is doing something right.
Even if nearly everyone involved in this seedy story is doing practically nothing but dead wrong.