This is no joke: Writer-director Adam McKay's The Big Short is the companion piece to his 2010 film The Other Guys, the Will Ferrell-Mark Wahlberg police-pension-system-swindle film whose end credits (see below) charted and graphed how a bailed-out Wall Street profited off the ruins of the American economy in the years following the housing market's demise.
The Big Short, based on the Michael Lewis book published the year The Other Guys opened, is the 130-minute back story fleshed out with familiar faces -- Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale -- getting rich while everyone else goes broke when the bubble bursts in 2007 and '08.
McKay, best known for titles in which Ferrell plays the soft (in the body and in the head) man-child, has always made funny movies about serious things -- like, say, how 24-hour cable TV ruined the news or how over-parenting births unearned entitlement. No one's better at making the medicine taste like candy.
But The Big Short sticks in the throat. You laugh at it only because you can't believe it was this awful -- that people were (and are) this awful. It's the horror movie soundtracked with nervous, incredulous giggles wrung from the rot of the soul.
It's also easily one of the best releases of 2015. Journalists love Spotlight because it makes newspapering heroic. But The Big Short does something even more impossible: It makes you root for -- feel for -- men who saw the End Times coming and did nothing to stop it except pause long enough to collect the return on their investment.
By the end, you'll finally know the difference between a credit default swap, collateralized debt obligation, a synthetic CDO and mortgage-backed securities. It turns jargon into a punch line and, then, poetry. It will make you laugh. It will make you angry. And it will scare the heck out of you by the end of its 130 minutes, when you realize we've learned nothing from the sins of the recent past.
There are no heroes in The Big Short, only shades of villainy. Bale's the barefooted nutty professor who sees the crash years before it emerges and bets the bank (someone else's) on the housing market's eventual demise. Carell's the all-id hedge-funder whose mission is to break the profiteers who stole a previous life. Pitt's the bearded former banker lured out of retirement by two greedy, eager comers. And Gosling's the over-tanned, over-coiffed sleazebro who knows just how to turn the whole broken system into a billion-dollar game of Jenga he'll never lose.
No one gets out alive -- not the banks that sold houses to people who couldn't afford the mortgages, not the credit rating agencies that sold their AAAs for pennies on the dollar to the banks and certainly not the overworked federal regulators literally hopping into bed with the banks for bigger bangs and bigger bucks.
It's the bleakest movie released this year. The Big Short makes The Revenant look like a tropical sunset. It's also the most thrilling, hilarious, infuriating and important.
The Big Short (A)
Directed by Adam McKay. R (pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity). 130 mins. In wide release.
