His seemingly insane investments create enough of a stir on Wall Street to attract the attention of alpha-douche banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, who also serves as the filmвЂ™s foul-mouthed narrator). By actually bothering to go through the thousands of individual mortgages that make up the securities that underwrite so much of the banking industry, Burry realizes that a dangerous number of subprime home loans are on the verge of going south, and decides to plug more than a billion dollars of his investorsвЂ™ money into credit default swaps, effectively betting against the housing market. First out of the gate is Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a stock-picking shaman with a glass eye and an utter lack of social graces, who crunches numbers while pacing his office barefoot and blaring Mastodon. But thereвЂ™s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and itвЂ™s impossible not to admire McKayвЂ™s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping through flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if thatвЂ™s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.ДЄdapted from Michael LewisвЂ™ bestselling book вЂњThe Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,вЂќ McKayвЂ™s film traces the roots of the global market collapse through the eyes of those who saw it coming and figured out ways to profit from it. Taking style cues from hip-hop videos, Funny or Die clips and вЂњThe Office,вЂќ Adam McKayвЂ™s filmВ hits its share of sour notes some important plot points are nearly impossible for laypeople to decipher even with cheeky, fourth-wall-obliterating tutorials, and the combination of eye-crossing subject matter and nontraditional structure makes it a risky bet at the box office.

Filmmakers looking to rectify this have already approached the story from a number of angles, from sober-minded documentary (вЂњInside JobвЂќ) to operatic boiler-room drama (вЂњMargin CallвЂќ), but the route taken by вЂњThe Big ShortвЂќ is by far the most radical, turning a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food. Of all the current centuryвЂ™s most cataclysmic world-historical events, the 2008 financial crisis is probably among the most poorly understood.

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