Equal parts goofy crime caper and cold-blooded rage against the machine that created the Global Financial Crisis, the newest film to explore the meltdown that exposed capitalism's great lie offers the most outrageous entertainment you've ever had in a movie theatre without understanding what's going on.
The GFC has had no shortage of film treatments, from lacerating documentary (Inside Job) to accomplished dramas both operatic (Margin Call; Arbitrage) and gritty (99 Homes). But McKay, a veteran of Saturday Night Live and comic collaborations with Will Ferrell, finds a bold and exciting new way in by making a disaster movie as an absurdist comedy.
If you haven't mastered the minutiae of credit default swaps and synthetic collateralised debt obligations, you're in the right place. As it happens, the film screeches to a halt from time to time to have characters or random imports (Selena Gomez at a roulette table; Margot Robbie in a bubble bath; Anthony Bourdain making fish stew) break the fourth wall and explain by analogy direct to camera.
But it doesn't matter if you don't get it; the film works the way the crooks did, by keeping everyone in the dark.
Adapted from Michael Lewis' 2010 bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, the film, which McKay co-wrote, takes a dizzying, adrenalin-fuelled approach to what is, in essence, a story of men sitting in rooms talking and looking at computer screens.
