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Rating: 9/10 (26 May 2020)

Director Adam McKay has a very unique style of filmmaking. You'll probably love it or hate it, with little in-between. For me, his crazy antics work perfectly in "The Big Short", telling the story of the 2008 housing crisis and subsequent Wall Street meltdown.
For a very basic overview, this movie tells the story of how Wall Street investors and bankers created a housing bubble that essentially broke the economy. Ostensibly narrated by the Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) character, it also focuses on Mark Baum (Steve Carell), an investor betting against the "common practice" for his own profit, and Michael Burry (Christian Bale), another man doing the same but who initially discovered the housing market being propped up by smoke and mirrors.
If you are looking for a straight-forward, ultra-dramatic treatise on the subject, you've come to the wrong place. As I mentioned, McKay just doesn't do things that way. Instead, you'll find characters breaking the fourth wall (turning to talk to the audience), dance breaks, freeze-frames, celebrity cameos, and all other manners of craziness. Instead of being distracting, though, these interludes instead always serve to illustrate a particular point. This is still a comprehensive tale of the housing collapse, but just without the rigidity or serious nature usually reserved for such "event biopics", if you will.
What really helps pull off McKay's vision is the incredible cast, led by Gosling, Bale, and Carell. Those three alone are enough to carry the weight, but even the supporting players provide interesting character opportunities. Add in the humor, music, and genre-defying format that McKay presents, and there's a lot of reasons to get sucked into the proceedings.
Perhaps most impressive, however, is that this film will leave you with a lot to think about in terms of who were the "good guys" and the "bad guys" in the entire scenario. Things are far from black-and-white in this case, and McKay does a great job of portraying those tensions. Even the characters (like Bale's) set up as "heroes" to begin with only do so by exploiting the very market they inevitably save (albeit through near-total economic collapse).
Overall, "The Big Short" is an excellent film that successfully recounts a real-life story in a supremely entertaining fashion without being too serious or too over-the-top (though it does come close on that latter front a few times!). This is probably even better than the more recent McKay project "Vice", as nothing feels quite so personal here. If you want the sub-prime montage scandal explained to you in a quasi-understandable way while at the same time being entertained in nearly every scene, "The Big Short" is the film for you.