convoluted

Rating: 5/10 (10 January 2016)

Famous writer director, Bill Wilder said if you are telling a complicated story you have to tell it in a simple way. He was right. This film wants to be funny and savvy and meaningful those are all great goals but it doesn't really achieve them. The story telling is as spastic as the camera-work is jerky, and the more it tries to make the back room dealings of corrupt banks make sense the less it does.
Another key thing is that our main characters goals are to profit from the impending doom of the economy and though a few moments are supposed to make us care about them we really don't. They still come off as amoral socially odd business men out to make bank so why do we care? We don't.
The attempts at hip comedy fail and are distracting--characters suddenly talking to the camera--directly to the audience, celebrity cameos trying to explain what's going on. These are just distractions. I guess they wanted an almost Michael Moore type vibe but in a more fictional type presentation. It's especially frantic on the big screen almost headache inducing during some of the 20 sec flash cut montage scenes that keep popping up.
It's great the director wanted to go for a "real" movie, that he doesn't succeed is too bad. A for effort as they say does not mean he gets an A.