Review: The Big Short (2016)

Surprise night out with one of my friends ended up in the cinema watching The Big Short, she tried to convince me she had planned it because she knew  I liked all the actors in it but i know the real reason.  She is currently working through her first year towards her MSc in Finance so I suspect she had an ulterior motive.

The Big Short follows three groups of people who all predicted the US housing crisis and set about betting against the housing market.  Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the first to spot the blip and sets himself up to basically bet his entire hedge fund on the outcome.  Two further groups catch on Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) and his team of misfits and newbies Jamie (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie (John Magaro) who recruit seasoned trader, Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to help them jump on the band wagon.

Admitted that is probably the worst synopsis of a film...EVER.  Yeah, way to make a comedy sound boring Jenna! Also, it is fair to say it sounds like the most boring film and when it started and they used all this financial and banking lingo (Shola sat next to me looking all smug because she knows what they are talking about). I have a blank look on my face when all of a sudden a definition pops up on the screen to help me along, then Margot Robbie, in a bath tub appears and starts explaining something or other.  Basically, it's like the film takes mini breaks to explain things and clarify whats going on.  The first few times it happened it threw me off the story and it actually annoyed me but as it went on it actually helped understand what was going on and added humour to the proceedings.

I was feeling so lost and out of my depth until Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explained it all to me. Why couldn't my Finance Unit of my HNC in Business have been presented that way? I might have listened! I loved how different The Big Short is to anything else I've seen, it had that almost 'The Office' style to it but it broke the 4th wall constantly which cracked me up. 

Between the crazy way this film is presented and the comedy that runs through it I was really entertained and, contrary to my very boring synopsis, I wasn't bored at all (and I actually feel like I might have learnt something about the cause of the global recession). Even though I knew they outcome, that all the main characters were right about what was going to happen, I still spent the last half an hour on the edge of my seat while their companies floundered waiting for the inevitable.  The final piece of the puzzle for me was the emotion that was run through the latter half of the film, particularly with Steve Carrells character, obviously they wanted to succeed and make their investors money but if they did the global economy would collapse.  It was really a no win situation for all these guys and Carell really highlighted that struggle between the rock and the hard place.

Oh I agree! Steve Carrell just shone brighter and brighter as the movie went on. I thought Christian Bale was superb though too, he definitely deserves that Oscar nomination.

I just feel that despite how much I enjoyed the movie, I didn't have a clue what was going on. It did a better job at explaining the situation to idiots like me than The Wolf of Wall Street did, but about half way through I gave up trying to understand the financial lingo and just enjoyed it for what it was.

In the car on the way home, my fiance and I worked out between us what a Synthetic CDO was, but what I still can't get my head around is what these swaps are in the first place. How can you bet against the housing market? When the average Joe can't pay his mortgage, where is this money coming from?

This is me the day after watching The Big Short, reading up on CDO's!

I have really fluffed this review, anybody that reads it is probably not going to want to bother with the film but do watch it, you have to decide for yourself and I enjoyed it much more that my review suggests.

How true was that final statement on screen right before the credits rolled? I can't remember what the term was for it, but it basically said that this is all starting again, as of last year. Where can I buy some swaps?