No NINJAs were harmed in the making of this film

Rating: 8/10 (23 May 2016)

"The Big Short" is a fast-moving, involving and sometimes confusing adaptation of the Michael Lewis bestseller. The Housing Crisis for Dummies skits are entertaining—Margot Robbie explains mortgage ("crap")–backed securities from her bubble bath; Selena Gomez acts out synthetic credit swaps in Vegas—but there's still lots of 'splaining to do (goofy-looking Hamish Linklater, one of the quants on Team Carell, is the default 'splainee), and the other characters themselves seem dazed and bewildered much of the time. That's kind of the point—the whole system had become so non-transparent and corrupt that by '07 nobody really knew what was going on
McKay's a comedy director by trade, of the David O. Russell, keep-lots-of-balls-in-the-air school, and maybe he lets things get a little more chaotic than they need to be, but the cast is outstanding—Christian Bale does another amazing character turn as a spectral fund manager; Steve Carell is perfect as a tightly wrapped Wall Street pro, as is Ryan Gosling as his handler and our cynical slickster narrator; Brad Pitt turns up from time to time as a survivalist investment guru who tried to get out but gets pulled back in again This lineup's pretty much a sausage fest, as the saying goes; nice to see Melissa Leo as a harried rating-agency exec and Marisa Tomei in the more conventional role of Carell's fretful wife.
I'd strongly recommend "The Big Short" if you have any tolerance for a complicated plot line with tons of expository dialogue and often baffling plot twists  I just read somewhere that Barack Obama really enjoyed it—though he was disappointed by the epilogue in which Ryan snarkily suggests that not all that much changed; no word yet on what Greenspan and Bernanke made of it.