It’s weird to see movies pop up about what I still consider to be fairly recent events, especially of ones that happened during the pandemic, but Dumb Money has been on my radar for a while now.
For anyone that may be unaware, Dumb Money is about the entire Gamestop (GME) saga that occurred in 2020 and 2021. Dumb Money is what people on Wall Street call your average joke that does their own personal investing and this story is about how those average people came together to shake the foundation of Wall Street and fleece the rich for billions of dollars in the process.
I won’t spend time explaining what happened because the movie does a great job of that for you. Rest assured you don’t need to be an investing whiz to follow and enjoy this movie!
I was excited for this movie for a few reasons. First, that I was part of this whole ordeal (though a modest one at that). I was frantically following these events as they occurred and was staring at stock tickers all day on my computer. It was really cool to be an actual part of a moment that had real impacts. Watching how average people were seeing obscene increases in their investments while at the same time costing some of the ultra rich to lose billions for trying to profit off the struggles of another business by shorting (betting against) Gamestop stock. GME went from around $3 per share in November 2020 to as high as $500 at one point.
The second reason though was the cast of this movie is stacked with talent. Paul Dano leads the way as Keith Gill or Roaring Kitty who really started this whole movement to begin with. Dano is really good as Gill in this movie and uses the time he’s allotted to flush out his character and make the audience care about him while showcasing the toll this took on his family life.
The cast also includes Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, and Shailene Woodley. However, this is where my first criticism of the movie comes in. This is a large cast for a movie that has to spend a decent amount of time explaining things and showing you what happens to these characters and I felt like beyond Paul Dano, most of the other characters didn’t really have time to shine or make me invested in their stories. I think a big issue was how similar these characters are from a narrative perspective. Much of the cast are playing other people that invested in GME and all struggle with similar issues. Do we hold? Do we sell? What if we hold too long and miss out? These same questions are what nearly everyone in this movie is dealing with and the only real differences are just their setups. You have two students that have a ton of student loan debt, a single mom who is also a nurse, and a Gamestop employee. By filling this movie with so many people with such similar stories, I felt like I wasn’t able to really connect in any meaningful way with their characters. I think this would’ve benefited from maybe focusing more on less characters for sure.
If you’ve seen The Big Short then this movie will definitely feel familiar. Unfortunately, I found this movie lacked the pace and character of The Big Short. Another thing that separated these two movies in the benefit of time passing. The Big Short released seven years after the 2008 financial crisis and so the impacts of that time were more evident and clear. Dumb Money on the other hand sort of feels incomplete in that we really don’t know the larger and longer term impact of the whole situation. Sure there is some finality to the stories of these characters, but the overall importance of the situation feels unclear because it’s still so soon afterwards.
Verdict
Overall, if you’re curious about the movie, I think it is definitely worth your time. It does a great job capturing the time and events as they unfolded. If you’ve never heard about the movie or don’t know anything about the whole situation, this will definitely be a fun way to bring you up to speed.
It’s a good time watching people eating tendies, watching GME go to the moon, and squeezing the rich in the process!
Have you had checked out Dumb Money? Let me know what you thought of the movie and please share your thoughts about my review as well! Thanks for reading and being part of my Screen Love Affair!
Adriana Wiszniewska