fictionalised documentary that trivialises

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2016)

I'm not quite sure what I expected from this film or why I was vaguely drawn towards it but I think I expected something like Get Shorty, with a great and wildly funny script and at the same time an insight into an industry i probably knew less than i though about. Instead this is very much a fictionalised documentary that trivialises a massive moment in our recent past. This is only eight years ago for goodness sake, most of us surely remember the horrors. People queuing to take their money out of Northern Rock before it collapsed, my own RBS pension with doubts hanging over it as my bank hovered on the brink. It is interesting to note that though most of the US comments are most favourable a rather large number of foreign language reviews are not. The US came out of this rather well (I know a lot of people lost their homes though this is barely mentioned in the film) - they got their housing market correction and passed all the crap securities to Europe. Instead of looking objectively at this, the film centres on a few privileged oafs and asks us to feel sorry because they might not make the money they wee hoping to out of the mess they were contributing to. The dialogue is fine, the performances are fine but the direction is slack and the editor must have fallen asleep, I know I nearly did!