A movie that shuts out 90% of audiences

Rating: 4/10 (12 January 2016)

"The Big Short" is a 130-minute movie from 2015 that seems to be one of the big players this awards season. The writer and director is Adam McKay, who is mostly known for his work on SNL, his Funnyordie short films and his films with Will Ferrell so far. Here he takes on a completely new ground. And successfully so if you can trust awards bodies. Same goes for Christian Bale (and Steve Carell to a lesser extent). However, I can not share the praise that this film has been getting. Bale and Carell have some good moments, but are occasionally over the top too. Gosling is pretty embarrassing with his talking to the audience as a younger, very poor man's version of Marty Kaan and I am not a fan of "House of Lies". Brad Pitt (also a producer here) is almost unrecognizable because of his makeup and adds nothing memorable to the film either. There are enough characters in here, but you never feel for any of them.
Early on, the film starts with pretty pretentious quotes by famous writers. Not much later, the film says that Wall Street profits a lot from people not understanding economical terms used by businessmen. All this is certainly true and I hoped that this film would become easier accessible at this point when it made said statement. It did not. People may not understand businessmen, but we also do not understand the men in this film either. Funnily enough, they use text to explain stuff mentioned by the characters on 1 or 2 occasions, but it's so random and doesn't help at all in the grand picture. It tries to be a documentary occasionally, but completely fails in getting the audience involved. McKay must have realized this and that's why he included the sob story for Carell's character completely out of nowhere.
I really wish the movie would have run 100 minutes max instead of 130 and actually managed to teach the audience something. They did not succeed on an informative level. They did not succeed on an emotional level. Honestly, they basically did not succeed on any level. I am writing this as somebody who does not have much of an interest into economy. But this is not a film that will get you interested. This is a film that will entirely shut you out if you do not have a profound interest in the matter. This is quite a shame as the contents in this movie were one of the most important developments of the 21st century that affected millions of people. I wish McKay could have given this a shot easier to access, like for example Reitman did in terms of unemployment with "Up in the Air". Baco to this one, it baffles me to see all the favorable reception from audiences, critics and awards bodies. I guess their egos in most cases are too big to admit that they had no clue what was going on in this borefest. Not recommended and 4/10 stars is actually pretty generous.