Film: Dumb Money hardly sets the pulses racing

The acquisition of wealth is very obviously one of the two great motivators of pretty much all human behaviour. The trouble is that it really doesn’t make for the most interesting of films. And it certainly doesn’t here.

Dumb Money is the scathing way, apparently, that the Wall Street big boys refer to the individual non-institutional investors. The professional money-makers are the ones with the smart money; the implication is that everyone else is dumb and their money with it.

Here, though, the big bods get their come-uppance in this bizarre real-life tale from barely a couple of years ago. It’s odd that it has come to the screen quite this quickly; presumably someone somewhere is convinced that it is rather more thrilling than it actually is.

The heart of it all is the 2021’s GameStop frenzy which most of us, with a life, probably completely missed.

The gist is that maverick small-time investor Keith Gill (Paul Dano) spotted an opening and became a cult hero simply by exploiting it.

His feeling was that Wall Street was massively undervaluing GameStop stocks. His response was to invest in them and to use Reddit and YouTube to get other small-timers to do the same, quietly but dutifully backed by his wife (Shailene Woodley).

We see a selection of people – students, a healthcare worker, a shop assistant etc – do the same, becoming mesmerised as the value of their investment goes up and up and up. Somehow, and please don’t explain it to me, as the little people gain millions, so the big baddies of Wall Street lose billions. We get plenty of gleeful, disbelieving expressions of delight intercut with the furrowed brows of smug financiers whose smugness is slowly and very painfully punctured.

It's lots of tiny individual Davids bringing down the complacent financial Goliaths – and presumably we are supposed to be thrilled about this. The point is that the markets exclude the little people – and this is the little people’s revenge.

But just as it is rather difficult to whoop around the room at these small-time investors making their fortunes, so is it rather difficult to feel awfully invested – no pun intended – when another bunch of baddies intervene and the small guys’ rapidly amassed theoretical riches evaporate as quickly as they appeared.

Of course, there are several more chapters to go after that, and there’s even government intervention – or at least a government inquiry – to find out what’s been going down and why. But is it terribly interesting? Well, no, not really – unless markets are your bag. Notional fortunes and notional losses hardly set the pulses racing for the rest of us. Maybe the way to have drawn in the financially-uninitiated would have been a little bit more by way of explanation at the start – though doubtless this would have annoyed everyone who’s into this kind of thing.

In the end, it’s watchable enough – and it’s probably enough to have followed the bare bones of it. But a film in which “short squeeze” meant something else entirely would have been far more interesting.

Monied people will always make money – whatever this film might suggest. And at the end, as the credits roll, it’s difficult not to wander off with a big fat “So what!”