"Dumb Money"

  ☆☆☆ 

Not all that long ago—just four years ago, by the calendar, or last year, if you don't count the two missing years of the pandemic—movies like Dumb Money were Hollywood's bread and butter: Cheap, easy, fun entertainment that could reasonably be expected to bring in an audience of adults looking for an absorbing diversion. The movies were full of Dumb Money.

Not so much anymore. Dumb Money is still a good movie. Maybe even slightly better than good, though not quite good enough to be great. It's got an incredible cast, all of whom deliver amusing, credible performances, and it's got some worthwhile observations about one of the weirder bits of recent history.

If you don't pay very much attention to the stock market, there's a good chance you missed the story that Dumb Money retells: How, in early 2021, when the world had tired of the pandemic and lots of people were still white-hot with anger over the ugly, tumultuous summer of the year before, a whole bunch of otherwise normal people got together and turned the tables on Wall Street. They did this by taking two stock that were considered such terrible businesses—GameStop and AMC Theatres—that big investors had actually bet against them. And like the spoiler who comes in, bets against the table in craps, and wins, they turned the game around.

There are a lot of really interesting, disturbing, uncomfortable things the GameStop fiasco revealed about Wall Street, the herd mentality of the Internet, the willingness of people to follow leaders they don't even know, the 21st century obsession with wealth. Dumb Money only bothers to look deeply at the first of these, because it views the people who caused the financial headache to be heroes. And maybe they are. Based on Dumb Money, there's really no way of knowing, because the script isn't very deep.

But it is fun. It's always fun to watch people stick it to The Man. It's always fun to see people beat the system. Fun With Dick and Jane is nearly 50 years old, but it's still a hoot—and it wasn't even a true story. This movie is about on par with that one, though I don't think it will take 50 years before people forget about it entirely.

It's fun to watch, it's inoffensive (unless you're easily offended by crude language), and it's well acted by a lot of excellent performers. It's also, curiously, a bit of a time capsule, as it takes place at a time when everyone was still wearing face masks, a moment this movie commemorates. And yet, Hollywood has killed this kind of movie, at least theatrically. Movies like Dumb Money exist now almost entirely to be tossed into the great Content Machine of streaming services. And that, despite Dumb Money's borderline mediocrity, is a shame. Had I watched this on streaming, I probably would have turned it off; it's simultaneously lightweight and convoluted, and attention spans being what they are, who wants that anymore? But in a theater, where the options are watch the movie or leave (or, sadly, and increasingly, turn on your phone and stare at it), Dumb Money effectively captures the attention, tells a good story, and in its own tiny way, reminds us what moviegoing is all about.

Or, used to be.

Viewed October 1, 2023 — AMC Topanga

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