Irritating Movie That Thinks Its Audience Is Dumb

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2016)

"The Big Short" takes a fascinating subject (the collapse of the real estate market that instigated the global economic collapse and recession in 2008) and then spends its entire running time apologizing for boring its audience. It tells the viewer early on that ordinary folk like us (the audience) and the bros who made the movie don't understand any of that stuff anyway, so they're going to make it interesting. Interesting means we get shots of Margot Robbie sipping champagne in a hot tub while she explains some economic term to us. Despite the filmmakers' attempts to make themselves one with the audience, the tone of the movie is ingratiating and condescending, and the whole thing is annoying to the extreme.
It's not like this subject matter hasn't been addressed before. The film "Margin Call" was about something very similar, but it managed to present the material straight and as if it really mattered without making its audience feel like dunces. "The Big Short" tells us here and there that the economic collapse was devastating to average people around the world, but it treats it mostly like a joke. It's like "Wolf of Wall Street" lite. And it commits what for me is the ultimate movie sin -- it telegraphs to us in flashing neon every emotion we're supposed to be filling at any given moment, never once giving us the opportunity to react ourselves.
The cast is pretty good, but they're asked to do things like pause and speak directly into the camera, the effectiveness of their performances hampered by poor directorial choices. Steve Carrell and Christian Bale are the standouts. Ryan Gosling suffers the most from the film's jokey tone. And Brad Pitt once again uses his producer credentials to insert himself into a film as the character who gets to lecture someone in the movie (and by extension the audience) about the moral ramifications of whatever the film's topic happens to be.
I would rather have just watched a documentary about the housing collapse. It might have given me more credit for having a brain in my head.
Grade: B-