The horrible housing market crash  left a lot of families without a penny to their name. Now, director Adam McKay adapts Michael Lewis’s best selling book into a movie that is every bit honest as it is tragic. The Big Short portrays several of the key players in the creation of the credit default swap market that sought to bet against the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) bubble and thus ended up profiting from the financial crisis of 2007–2010. In the center of this scandal is Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a doctor and expert stock analyst who predicted the demise of Citigroup and Bear Stearns; Mark Baum (Steve Carell), an outspoken funds manager;  Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), a Deutsche Bank trader; and two up-and-coming investors named Charlier Gellar (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) who are out to make a name for themselves at the expense of lower class income citizens. The final result is over 99 billion dollars in losses and a financial catastrophe still felt in this country seven years later. Greed is responsible for every bad thing in McKay’s film, and that greed can change everything in a matter of minutes.

“The Big Short” impacted me the strongest of any film that I have seen so far in 2015. Coming out of the theater left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach to the very vilains on Wall Street who can take everything from a dreamer with the ink of a pen. It’s by far McKay’s best directoral effort to date, and a lot of that comes from the brutal tellings of such a nasty motivator: Money. The film centers around commercialism and what living in a country like America in 2008 can do to one mental capacity. What really hurt me however, was when the crash finally happened and you saw people getting thrown out on the street, and yet these scheisters who presented the idea to these people are still keeping their jobs and making millions off of the weak. The first act of the story does start a little slow, and that’s because there are so many characters to introduce to the equation. The screenplay has a repetitious nature during these first few scenes, but luckily the movie improves by a second act that learns to edit everyone’s reactions together instead of playing them off one after another. The story never gets easier as the two hours persist, but you learn a lot about people’s motivations and careless intentions when it comes to taking someone’s money.

This film will no doubt have comparisons to 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”, and while that film is overall a better and more entertaining presentation, this film is all about communicating just how tough it is to learn the lingo of trading and investments. On the subject of more commercialism, Americans love to hear everything from a celebrity’s mouth, so when something difficult needs to be explained, it’s told by Selena Gomez, or Margot Robbie, or Anthony Bourdain. The real joke is in the fact that even after their literal explanations, the audience still struggles with understanding. This of course can be a positive or a negative for the film, as some people will shut off a movie that they don’t understand, therefore missing the bigger picture by the end of the film. Another creative touch comes from the film’s incredible editing that is Oscar worthy, as it shows several inter-cutting scenes with what is transpiring on-screen. It reminded me several times of Danny Boyle’s current work, and it proves that Adam McKay can play with the big boys when he wants to. When the idea first breaks, the inter-cutting scenes shows America thriving and people walking in the streets with happiness. When the crash happens, we are presented a side-by-side comparison of a first class lifetstyle with a lower class homeless person now out on the street. None of this means anything until you discover the numbers of just how much these jerks profited in such a pitfall.

The top level cast will undoubtedly bring a lot of people to the theater to see this, and their performances are can’t-miss material. Christian Bale is his usual quiet self, but you understand that their is something special to his genius below the surface. As Burry, he is a prodigy of sorts when it comes to his predictions, and his character has some of the best reactional scenes of the film. Steve Carell is possibly the only conscience of the movie. At first, we see him as just another jerk wanting to get rich quick, but what makes his character different is that he seeks out the information on how these people get rich. I would’ve gladly taken a movie from his point of view alone, and unfortunatly the movie does steer away from him during some scenes when the plot is just getting hot. However, Carell’s fast tongued dialogue combined with his expertise in sarcasm, made his character an original tier to the shady characters surrounding the story. The best performance in the film for me however, was that of Ryan Gosling as a devilish grinning investor. He is responsible for so much deestruction around him, and Gosling does it with a lick of the lips to almost an orgasmic level of joy he gets from hurting others. You won’t cheer for his character by any means, but you will enjoy the performance from one of Hollywood’s hottest hunks playing opposite of anything he has ever done, and having the time of his life.

Overall, “The Big Short” is one of those timepiece films that everyone should be forced to watch. McKay strikes a satirical string in the heartbeats of Americana greed combined with 21st century ideals. It’s a well acted, sharply edited, tragically blistering film that is frightening because it’s happening every day.

8/10