✯✯½

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Remember hearing all those stories about the GameStop short squeeze while we were still going through one of the worst periods of the COVID-19 pandemic? If you answered “yes” to this question, try imagining what a movie about that could feel like. Dumb Money might as well be the answer you’re looking for, especially if you’re hoping for a film that can explain everything to you a la Adam McKay like he did with The Big Short. Or you could just as easily ask for a TikTok to get you up to speed with everything. The latter perhaps may be a better statement to reflect Dumb Money on the whole.

Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s (author of The Accidental Billionaires, which became the basis for The Social Network) book The Antisocial Network, this is a film telling the story of the investors from a subreddit known as r/wallstreetbets, who were responsible for the infamous GameStop short squeeze. In particular, we’re seeing this story from the side of Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill (Paul Dano) and some of his followers, who banded together to buy stock in GameStop as investors Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) bet on the stock to fail, as well as the founder of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan). One could wonder how much of a story for feature length could be pulled from an event so recent, but even after seeing the final results, I can’t help but question its effectiveness.

For those who remembered Gillespie’s film I, Tonya, which took the conventional biopic structure to task when telling the story of Tonya Harding, it’d be easy enough to expect that he could try for something that shows he’s having fun with the material in Dumb Money. With making a film about an event like this so soon after the craziness had hit such a high peak would only mean pieces are missing from the whole story. This may very well be evident in how events are strung together in order to fit in differing points of view from those who are directly taking part in the GameStop short squeeze, and as a result the film lacks a clear sense of focus.

The stacked cast of Dumb Money might very well be the best thing that the film has going for it, because it’s clear they’re having fun with the parts that they have. In particular, Seth Rogen and Pete Davidson might be the best of the bunch, but everyone else is very hit-or-miss. Paul Dano, a normally reliable actor, feels like a very bizarre casting choice to play Keith Gill, who isn’t much younger than Dano is. But I think the weak links are the storylines of America Ferrara, Anthony Ramos, Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder – whose bits may be important to showing the effectiveness of the short squeeze, yet they also feel disconnected from the central players.

Maybe what’s also most jarring about Dumb Money to me is the fact that this is a film without a very defined audience. Many moments of the film are funny, even if they’re so far and few in between, but it’s hard to really tell who exactly it’s for. A lot of the film is steeped in the online culture that many had gotten themselves so heavily involved in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but those bits take sudden stops soon after as we get down to the business with the aftermath of the short squeeze. By that point, the film’s biggest problem for me comes in – it starts to feel like two different movies mashed into one. One you’ll have something aiming for a younger audience with needle drops of “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion, the next you’ll have Gillespie trying to emulate The Social Network, but really, no one can match up to David Fincher.

I, Tonya didn’t especially work for me, but I think that it’s easy to tell that Gillespie can be more playful if he chose to. But maybe Dumb Money just wasn’t the right material, because it’s evident that there are still so many missing pieces to the story we aren’t seeing. Still, I think Gillespie is capable of showing himself to be a director capable of being more playful and bits of Dumb Money show themselves to be exactly that. But even though I may have laughed along for the ride, I feel like it just could have been a lot better. Not bad, but a story this outrageous probably should have waited a couple more years so we can really get the full scope of what happened.

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Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Sony.

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Directed by Craig Gillespie
Screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo, based on the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich
Produced by Aaron Ryder, Teddy Schwarzman, Craig Gillespie
Starring Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen
Release Date: September 15, 2023
Running Time: 104 minutes