Perfect title. Craig Gillespie takes the epic Game Stop Saga and turns it into a solid 2 hour joke at the expense of the super rich. Even though Dumb Money lacks The Big Short‘s visual and storytelling daring, sometimes all you want to do is watch overconfident rich people get humiliated in public by a YouTuber from the Boston suburbs named Roaring Kitty. Not one of Ken Griffin’s finer days I can tell you.
Roaring Kitty’s real name is Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a low level financial analyst who YouTubes, Reddits, and plays the stock market occasionally. Gill sees Melvin Capital’s Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and a bunch of other big time financial giants shorting Game Stop, the video game rental/electronics store, and takes a chance short squeezing the short sell by the multimillionaires and billionaires. That little win gets the attention of all the nurses (America Ferrara), mall workers (Anthony Ramos), student debt holders (Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold), and Uber Eats drivers (Pete Davidson) seeing this as their chance to stick it to the rigged system, so they all pour money into Game Stop at the expense/ridicule of Plotkin and his backers Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) and Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio).
The best parts of Dumb Money are the character intros. While Griffin, Cohen, and Plotkin comfortably live life in their mansions in 2020 away from the coronavirus, the rest of the cast is introduced doing something any normal person would be doing with their life: the essential workers during the Covid 19 pandemic. How many of you roll your eyes at corporate selling handbooks critiquing your sales pitch? Or watching your parents lose their pension from a gut & run financial scheme? Or are saddled with 100K in student loans? Or being told to mask up by an uptight boss for the million and 1st time? All of these small time investors have righteous fury towards the system that takes advantage of them, quickly explaining who they are any why buying Game Stop makes them feel so good. Craig Gillespie efficiently sets up the vast, diverse group of investors as well as how far and wide the message got.
And that 2nd part is what makes this financial satire compelling. Dumb Money is a positive example of social media, as all of these disparate tiny investors found their community on various platforms. Without YouTube, Reddit, or Robin Hood, this little Boston Tea Party would have been quelled early by the big boys. Instead, the boys laughed at the dubious, terse messaging and missed the point of the Reddit posts and YouTube comments: that everyone’s mad and ready to fight for this one. Gillespie show also how truly rigged the system is. The minute the biggest fish feel a whiff of fear, they use their power and resources to suppress this movement in any way possible: shutting down the r/WallStreetBets, or coercing Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) to turn off the “Buy” button for Game Stop on Robin Hood. What is supposed to be a free market Gillespie and his cast point out is only free to a certain extent, and then things have to be set right again, sadly.
But hey, at least it was fun while it lasted! Watching Plotkin, Griffin, and Vlad Tenev squirm and sweat their way through federal questioning was basically worth Dumb Money’s price of admission. Hopefully r/WallStreetBets continues irritating the hell out of the big boys, making their lives less easy and even a little more annoying, which will infuriate them. As for Keith Gill, I hope he rode off into private life, with a nice little nest egg for his family. And I also hope Ken Griffin’s Citadel has shown it has a few weak spots in its money built fortress.