A Solid Drama From A Comedic Director

Rating: 7/10 (10 November 2016)

I was so excited to see this movie I thought it had the potential to be this years The Wolf of Wall Street but I was slightly disappointed as this film wasn't quite as good as I wanted it to be but was a good film but unfortunately not great. Yet this film still has plenty good in it with Christian Bale and Steve Carell being the standouts. I have never seen Christian Bale Iike I have in this movie he's so sympathetic and his character has a great heart to him and he was also very funny in a few scenes that I was not expecting. If you told me a few years ago that Steve Carell was capable of delivering such a good emotional performance I would have been sceptical not only is he great in his fearful and emotional scenes but he's got such a good motivation behind him I thought he was a great character to get behind and Carell is continuing to impress me. Ryan Gosling was also really good in this film he was definitely the most entertaining character he had some great one liners and delivered some of the films biggest laughs. The way the movie dumbed things down for the audience was really smart and unique it's not insulting to the audiences intelligence it's just the filmmakers being self aware. The actual real estate crash itself is very well built up and thought it was such a hard sequence to watch you get just how big the scale of this event was and cannot imagine a better way they could have handled it. Adam McKays direction in this film was a bit on and off for me sometimes he was on point with his unique approach to certain scenes especially in the dumbing down scenes but sometimes he uses intentionally crappy camera work and editing at first I thought that I could get over it but I couldn't and repeatedly got on my nerves. The sub-plot between Brad Pitts character and the two young investors just really did not need to be in this movie it didn't really provide anything extra to this film and detracted from the central story line. The story arcs of some of the supporting characters did not get a satisfying conclusion we never see anything if any wrap up with them other than I kind of dialogue towards the end of the film.
There are things I love about this movie and it's undeniably ambitious it's by no means a bad film is got far to much good in it from a performance and writing level to be bad it's not quite as good as I wanted it to be but is still a good movie.
72%/B