Surprisingly captivating

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2017)

The Big Short tells about the years leading to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, which was caused by the United States housing bubble. It shows and explains how the situation came to be and how certain people managed to predict its inevitability and exploited it to get rich. It's filled with powerhouse actors, is over two hours long and contains almost nothing but talk about economics, money and similar things.
And yet it's a rather good film. This is thanks to a few things. First are the actors. Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and most of the others are huge talents and their sheer presence manages to make most of the scenes work. The second reason is the script and the fact that it focuses more on the people behind the crisis rather than the crisis itself. It explores how our own ignorance, laziness and stupidity caused the housing bubble and how it took certain amount of outside the box thinking to realize it was happening.
That being said, I also admire how the film manages to make the crisis itself understandable and relatable to mass audiences. Whenever the plot brings up a hard term or an odd concept, the film takes a brief moment to stop and explain the thing in layman's terms, but in a way that in no way hinders the narrative. It's actually really clever how they pull it off, though I shall not spoil it here.
All in all The Big Short is a really good drama film. I know it doesn't sound that exciting, but trust me that in this case the execution is so good that it just works.