Dumb Money’s version of the GameStop saga isn’t smart enough — or dumb enough

polygon.com:

This review of Dumb Money comes from the film’s premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be released later in September.

With everyone stuck at home in the late months of 2020 and the early months of 2021, it was hard not to at least be aware of the GameStop short-squeeze saga, a Reddit-fueled stock run that cost major hedge funds billions of dollars. It took the internet by storm with what seemed like an Occupy Wall Street for the meme era. There was plenty of talk about David-vs.-Goliath conflict and the triumph of the small investor, alongside endless memes about “stonks.” For some, it was hilarious revenge on big companies expecting GameStop to fail. For others, it was an offensive manipulation of the American economy by amateurs doing it for lulz. Either way, it was a revolution with an actual impact on Wall Street.

The story also inspired multiple documentaries and docuseries across the various streaming services: Max, Hulu, and Netflix all released their own looks at the GameStop saga. There were also reports of three separate feature films being rushed into development by different studios. The first to see the light of day — Dumb Money, starring Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, and Seth Rogen — is openly out to solicit the same award-season attention granted to a similar fictionalized Wall Street saga, The Big Short.

But Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money is neither dumb enough to capture the bonkers nature of the story nor smart enough to turn it into an entertaining or even informative tale. The film takes the same approach as every one of the documentaries released on the subject. It’s a surface-level David-versus-Goliath story of internet revolution amid a global pandemic, with the big