There's a strong case to be made for comparing "Dumb Money" to "The Big Short." Both films are very similar, both thematically and tonally. Both deal with relatively recent cases in the financial world in which a group of outsiders bet against "Wall Street". However, "Dumb Money" clearly draws the short straw in the comparison. "The Big Short" did a much better job of explaining the context to non-experts. You should ideally know all of the technical terms before watching "Dumb Money."

But the movie is by no means bad. The pace of the story is good, and the cast is impressive. However, it might have been better to cut a few of the characters and instead focus on a smaller number of them. As it is now, you don't really get to know much about anyone. Paul Dano comes closest to having something to do, but even with him, more screen time would certainly have helped.

The film's overall presentation is adequate at best. It certainly wasn't a bad idea to incorporate a lot of TV and social media snippets into the movie. After all, it perfectly captures the main theme of the story. On a technical level, however, it's anything but exciting. And I also found the choice of music too aggressive at times, without much being memorable. The latter also applies to the movie as a whole. Unlike "The Big Short", I probably won't watch "Dumb Money" more than once because, unfortunately, the movie isn't more than just okay.

To be perfectly honest, I have never quite understood how you could make money buying stock in a company that you actually wanted to go bust! I watched this and I'm still not really any the wiser. It all centres around the internet influencer Keith Gill (Paul Dano) who quite fancied the undervalued stock in a video game store called "GameStop". He started to suggest to his followers that this was a decent buy - despite the fairly obvious fact that the venture capitalists were selling the company short with a view to it collapsing. Slowly but surely the word spreads and the stock starts to rise. What now ensues is a worm that turns story as the gazillionaires at their polo clubs find these gadfly small investors really are becoming a fly in their vichyssoise. Can the little guy prevail? This is quite an enjoyably paced drama with it's roots in reality but for me, the acting was really lacklustre and it drew a really simplistically linear distinction between the have and the have nots that didn't really intrigue my brain. It certainly demonstrates the power of the internet and that galvanising the population can easily buck some established business practices but somehow I didn't especially admire the little guys here either - they were to varying degrees just as aspirational, wanted what the rich guys had and didn't much care how they got it! Still, it's enjoyable enough to watch but I'd wait til it is on the television