Math Horror

Rating: 8/10 (9 July 2016)

In McKay's smart, tense economic-horror film, unfathomable numbers and equations shamble toward you with blunt inexorability. The more prescient characters see this horde coming, and know that it carries some sort of systemic infection, but are either unwilling or unable to stop it. Throw in McKay's deft handling of absurdism and a terrific cast, and this movie could have been the "Dr. Strangelove" of the subprime era.
It isn't, though. McKay is clearly passionate about the material, and he brings a new maturity and restraint to his treatment of it, but...it could have benefited from a breath of lunacy to give the viewer some distance and perspective, and offer some catharsis for the mounting frustration of watching the inevitable unfold. There is some wry embedded commentary from characters who break the fourth wall and address the audience directly, and of course it isn't fair to punish the film because it isn't the "Dr. Strangelove" hybrid that I just now invented while writing this.
The film McKay DID make is terrific, and worth watching more than once. I guess what I'm getting at is this: The subprime debacle was an outrage on anyone who's bought so much as a bag of Combos in the last 8 years, and I'm still waiting for the movie that communicates that outrage. Somewhere between the shiny Bacchanalia of Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" and this, its more erudite and less coke-fueled cousin, lies the festering indignation that we don't seem quite ready to embrace yet.