Film reviews: Dumb Money | Expend4bles | The Lesson | A Cat Called Dom
Dumb Money (15) ****
The Expend4bles (15) **
The Lesson (15) **
A Cat Called Dom (15) ****
Based on the bizarre story of a bunch of amateur investors who took on a Wall Street hedge fund intent on strip-mining a going-out-of-business video game retailer called GameStop at the height of the pandemic, Dumb Money plays like an inverted blue-collar version of the Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street, zeroing in on a disruptor who actually has some scruples and isn’t just out to make as much money as he can.
A David and Goliath story for the fast-moving digital age – and a nifty catchall metaphor for the daily volatility of the pandemic too – it stars Paul Dano as Keith Gill, a nerdy, unassuming financial analyst and part-time YouTuber whose Reddit and YouTube posts about his decision to invest his life-savings in what he viewed as an under-valued stock went viral in early 2021. With his penchant for cat memes and dorky headbands, his financial transparency and guilelessness, Gill inspired amateur investors to follow suit. But when the value of their shares kept going up and up, their collective investments took on more of a political dimension, becoming a way to stick it to the billionaire hedge-fund managers riding out the pandemic in the lap of luxury.
Advertisement
Hide AdThat’s an irresistible hook for a movie and director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) milks it for all its worth, making the most of the way Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo’s nimble script smartly offsets all the impenetrable financial jargon with the more compelling human stories at the heart of this tale about democratising the financial world. At first that means zeroing in on Gill’s relationship with his supportive wife (Shailene Woodley) and feckless brother (an amusing turn from Pete Davidson), but the film soon broadens out to focus on some of the ordinary investors caught up in the craze, among them America Ferrara as a nurse struggling to make ends meet and Anthony Ramos as a GameStop employee. Seth Rogen, meanwhile, is slyly cast against type as Gabe Plotkin, the hedge-fund manager who takes the biggest hit.
As politicians, tech firms and the media get sucked into the story, Gillespie is perhaps guilty of inflating the revolutionary aspect of what was ultimately achieved, but he provides a very entertaining snapshot of what went down nonetheless.
It’s one of the stranger aspects of the risible Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise that Jason Statham has been so willing to prop up each instalment. As practically the only cast member who doesn’t require extensive body doubling during the heavily CGI’d (and cheaply rendered) action sequences, he surely deserves better. The best that can be said about The Expend4ble s is that it at least it acknowledges Statham is the star. Contriving a way to give Stallone – looking especially creaky – more of a backseat, the plot is the usual nonsense: a botched mission to retrieve some nuclear MacGuffin from Libya results in Statham’s Lee Christmas being kicked off the team and his bad-ass girlfriend Gina (Megan Fox) assuming command. Draining any potential fun from the latter situation, the film gives Fox nothing interesting to say or do, which means we’re mostly stuck watching Dolph Lundgren, 50 Cent and former mixed martial arts star Randy Couture’s painful attempts at banter whenever Statham isn’t on hand to throat-punch or garrotte someone.
Disproving TS Eliot’s assertion that “good writers borrow; great writers steal”, director Alice Troughton’s dreary, literary themed debut The Lesson appropriates this observation wholesale, attributing it to Richard E Grant’s novelist character and using it to repeatedly signpost the film’s groaningly obvious and uninteresting twist. Grant plays JM Sinclair, a revered writer whose vast literary fame has enabled him to acquire a massive country mansion in which he’s struggling to finish his latest book under the cloud of a recent family tragedy. Into this world comes young Oxford graduate Liam (Daryl McCormack), who’s hired by Sinclair’s wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) to tutor their son Bertie (Stephen McMillan). We know from the prologue that Liam has written some kind of acclaimed literary debut based on his time with the Sinclairs, but as the ensuing film plays out in one extended flashback, any hope that we’re in for a Patricia Highsmith-esque thriller about an aspiring writer insinuating himself into the life of his literary idol is quickly dashed by the realisation that this is going to be a much more banal and farcically executed affair. True, Grant’s patrician hamminess is mildly entertaining (for a while), but Delpy’s talents are largely wasted on a rubbish Machiavellian subplot.
A far more interesting film about creativity is on offer in A Cat Called Dom, an intriguing, partially animated docudrama from Scottish animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, the award-winning team behind the Bafta-winning short The Making of Longbird. Like that film, it’s another self-referential behind-the-scenes look at their creative struggle to create a new work. Yet what starts off as a commission to make some short animations for a TV channel is sidetracked by Anderson dealing with the revelation that his mother has contracted cancer – news that knocks him for six, but also causes him to retreat from Henderson and fall into his own world via the titular animated cat that lives on his computer’s desktop. It’s very imaginatively done and though Anderson worries at one point that it’s not the “funny film about cancer” he wanted it to be, what emerges is something better: a moving portrait of a son’s love for his mother.
All films on general release from 22 September.