Dumb Money Review

In the time it took big-budget studios to see what was happening with the GameStop shares and Reddit involvement, the movement came, went, came back again and died. Dumb Money is now the immediate kneejerk to an otherwise minor footnote in a year of history. Not all of history, just last year. Or the year before. Whichever it was – Dumb Money would rather have you not remember. Look instead at the hefty pay packet they handed off to Paul Dano to shed light on this experience. A defiant experience in Wall Street history is coupled with a comedy-adjacent feature for Seth Rogen and the SNL alumni to take a pop at, the next step for their careers lies in the salvation provided by the dying star of Craig Gillespie. 

From its record scratch moments making no considered sense, what WAP has to offer here, what the iconography and bits of big value greed are displaying, it shows very little. Dumb Money is one of those films which is easy to lean back into but never rely on it for support – it soon crashes in on itself. Despite fine work from Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Offerman as those meat sacks making billions, the tethered Rogan villain and the anxiety-riddled everyman Dano are solid but lack depth. All of this lacks depth, and no wonder, it is a fascinating event yet a pockmark of history which occurred either through boredom or chance, according to Dumb Money. Betting against Wall Street is shown as this wildcard experience which nobody would ever believe to do. Dumb Money is a lightning-in-a-bottle experience, or should be. Something like this occurs once in a lifetime. 

Seize it, then. Gillespie does not and the showcase of parts is relatively skewered. Family pressures, a desire to turn Keith Gill into a mastermind hero of mega proportions with troubles of his own brewing under the surface is the equivalent of trying to pull a feature film from a premise with no work in between. Dumb Money is light on experience, on interest and has very little to say for itself or the impact a social group had on the stock market. It almost feels afraid to lay down some commentary or judgment on what has occurred, and it stinks. At least Dano is solid, his tired and centralised leading potential is, as expected, a very strong draw and he is a pleasure to watch. He has been since Little Miss Sunshine and this, a rare misfire in his career, still provides glows of quality. 

There is a sense in this which has Gillespie looking down on the people who uncovered a grand horror of Wall Street. Basement dwellers who lucked out is all Dumb Money can say for its monumental efforts of willpower in not shorting this or selling that at a time when doing so would be perfectly reasonable. A need to capture this story before it slips away even further is on the mind of everyone involved – and though the likes of America Ferrera and Pete Davidson come off well in this, others are sidelined for no good reason. Shailene Woodley is merely a familial catalyst for Dano to occasionally bump into in the living room, while Ferrera is utilised as the explainer as to why people listened to a man in a red bandana against the suits who keep the working man down. It all feels a tad trivial and a spit in the face, a bit like Don’t Look Up but not as egregious or annoying.