Oh the irony

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2016)

I enjoyed this movie even if it made me feel somewhat uneasy. Any film,doc or book that explains how the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) occurred I tend to be interested in.
My main issue with the movie is that it portrays that main protagonists as heroes but the reality is they profited from the collapse of the financial system and all the pain it subsequently caused. The irony is that the credit default swaps (CDS) that they purchased (essentially going short on the collateralised debt obligations (CDOs)) were a main cause of the collapse of some of the big financial institutions. By purchasing CDS s they were essentially betting that the mortgage instruments (CDOs) would fail . Of course once the big banks got wind of what was going on and began to realise how bad these sub prime mortgage instruments were they started furiously buying the very same credit default swaps.Subsequently once the CFC occurred large institutions such as Lehman Brothers failed as they couldn't make good on all the credit default swaps they had sold.
I feel the movie glossed over this aspect so its main characters came out looking like they took on the big banks for the little man. This was never the case. They did it for their own benefit pure and simple and this money stayed in their own pockets along with their investors.
Apart from this it was well acted, good story line if somewhat slow in parts. A solid 7 out of 10