Dumb Money: An Entertaining Look At A Small But Impactful Moment

In late 2020 into early 2021, a strange story from the finance sector took the country by storm in the form of the GameStop short squeeze. The short version of what happened was that a number of hedge funds had bet against GameStop with the goal of making a lot of money on the presumed impending failure of the company. A large number of retail investors saw this and invested a ton of money into the stock, costing the hedge funds billions of dollars while they themselves made a lot of money. Dumb Money is the story of that moment that is trying to channel movies like The Big Short
but misses the mark just a little.

Specifically, the Dumb Money follows Keith Gill (Paul Dano), the YouTuber and Reddit poster who started the whole movement to buy GameStop stock and tells the stories of other people who invested around the country including a nurse named Jennifer (America Ferrara), two college students (Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold), and a GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos). Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Pete Davidson, Sebastian Stan, and Dane DeHaan also star.

The way the movie is structured is probably the most interesting aspect of the film. Keith is very clearly the protagonist and Paul Dano can carry the movie in that regard, however where the film gets interesting is taking the stories of these other people and telling them (superficially to an extent) with the purpose of exploring how the world is reacting to the story. This makes the story feel more universal while still grounding it into the personal narrative at the core with Keith Gill and his family. Through this, it also lays out the arguments that people made for investing in GameStop to justify their decisions in an interesting way.

The movie has two sort of systemic issues that keep it from hitting the heights of a movie like The Big Short. The first and most direct is that the viewer never sees Keith’s process to determine why GameStop is a stock worth investing in. His rationale is stated superficially, however, his actual thought process is not explained so it feels less like an informed decision and more like a form of mob mentality. One of the things that The Big Short (only referenced so much because of how obviously this movie is trying to build on that film’s success) did well was explain what people saw in the impending housing market collapse to make shorting it feel like a smart investment. The other thing is similar to the issue with last year’s documentary GameStop: Rise of the Players is that the film is very clearly designed to canonize those who invested in GameStop more than it is invested in highlighting some of the systemic issues until the very end of the movie. There is a conversation to be had about hedge funds and the power they hold, however someone watching this movie may get the impression they know everything about the topic while only hearing about this very small section ignoring some of the much larger and wider intersections of money and power that hold major sway over people’s livelihoods.

Dumb Money is still an entertaining enough movie to make it worth a trip to the theater to see, even if it is a little superficial at times. The performances are great, with small standout performances from Pete Davidson, Clancy Brown, and Dane DeHaan and some really interesting editing choices in terms of cutting real-world footage with recreations. It is worth watching, even if someone was not entirely tied into the short-squeeze three years ago.

Final Rating: 8/10