Australian director Craig Gillespie made a movie in 2007 that got so much buzz, and I was the only critic that didn’t like it. It was the Ryan Gosling film “Lars and the Real Girl” about a man that falls in love with a blow-up doll, and the town that accepts this relationship.
Since that time, he’s done pictures I’ve enjoyed – “I, Tonya,” “Cruella” and even the not-so-well received “Million Dollar Arm” I thought was fun (I didn’t see the pieces he made on Mike Tyson and Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee).
So once again Gillespie has grabbed a real life story and made a film about it. It’s the 2021 incident involving GameStop stock and the short squeeze. It was when a group of amateur investors on Reddit started buying up the stock, ruining things for the Wall Street fat cats.
It all started when Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who did his own cheesy stock market show online, recommended the GameStop stock. He often championed undervalued stocks, and was made fun of for his goofy headbands, cat posters and T-shirts.
The movie gives us a group of people investing in the stock, so we can get a feel for how this affects the working-class. Yet they all felt one-dimensional, and not at all like real people.
There’s Marcus (Anthony Ramos, who was so great in “In The Heights”), an actual GameStop employee. There is a lesbian couple (Myha’la Herrold, Talia Ryder) that are college students that invest everything they have into the stock, hoping to pay of student loans. There’s a single mom/nurse named Jennifer (America Ferrera, coming off the success of “Barbie”). And my favorite character of the bunch is her friend and co-worker (Larry Owens), who was giving the kind of advice I was thinking the entire time.
The Goliath crew of this David vs. Goliath tale, consists of actors I dig – Seth Rogen playing Gabe Plotkin, Nick Offerman playing Kennth Griffin, and Vincent D’Onofrio as Steve Cohen.
Sebastian Stan (who played Tommy Lee) is also slimy and perfect in the role.
They’re billionaires, so we aren’t rooting for them, or the way they’re bailing each other out.
The talented Shailene Woodley was wasted, merely playing the worried wife of Keith. Clancy Brown, who always played great villains, is okay in a small role as the working-class father who’s dealing with two adult kids making decisions he doesn’t agree with (one of those kids is played by Pete Davidson, who I can’t stand to watch on screen and I never think is funny).
Some of the humor in this work, much of it felt like dated material, though (it was strange to hear a Jimmy Buffett joke, with him recently passing).
I had mixed feelings about the information dump of it all. That doesn’t make for great cinema, but I know so little about how the stock market works, I needed that.
Ultimately, I just didn’t think there was enough compelling material here. It would have been an interesting story to read in the Wall Street Journal, vs. a two hour film. And, it’s not nearly as hip as the filmmaker thought it was. You think of better movies, like Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Wolf of Wall Street (a quick clip of that movie is shown in this).
I’m not sure if this is the movie you should invest in this weekend (see what I did there?), but it was entertaining enough that my wife and I didn’t mind watching it.
2 ½ stars out of 5.