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Four years on from the infamous GameStop short squeeze, your friendly neighborhood Traders Magazine editor finally got around to watching Dumb Money over the holidays.
The 2023 biographical comedy-drama chronicled the whole affair through the eyes of ‘Roaring Kitty’, aka individual investor and social media influencer Keith Gill, plus a number of regular folks who made and/or lost vast sums of money on the rise and fall of $GME stock and options in early 2021.
From the description: “Dumb Money is the ultimate David vs. Goliath tale, based on the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world’s hottest company. In the middle of everything is regular guy Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the stock and posting about it. When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a movement, everyone gets rich — until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.”
Dumb Money was a commercial failure, as Sony Pictures spent $30 million to make the movie and it made only $8 million at the box office, according to ScreenRant.
Critic reviews aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes are a surprisingly high 84% positive, or “Certified Fresh” rating on its Tomatometer. We would have expected a certified-fresh number more in the 60s or thereabouts. But at the same time, most of the positive reviews were only tepidly positive, ScreenRant noted, with few reviewers pounding the table that the movie is a must-see.
Traders Magazine gives Dumb Money two and a half stars. (That’s based on the late Roger Ebert’s four-star rating system, where two and a half was for films he liked in certain aspects but overall would not recommend.)
Dumb Money was okay – it had its moments of fun and it was entertaining enough in Hollywood’s schmaltzy, formulaic and predictable way. But overall it was, well, dumb in ways, as the underdog-wins theme was overplayed to the point of being tiresome, and character development was thin. Traders Magazine does not recommend investing one hour and forty five minutes to watch it — the film doesn’t hold a candle to earlier-era business movies such as Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, or even the underrated 1990s drama Boiler Room.
One mildly positive Rotten Tomatoes review that resonated read as follows: “There’s something about this story — maybe it’s too simplistic, maybe it’s the fact that the actual events are so recent that the film can’t comment meaningfully on their potential future implications — that makes its populist bent feel contrived.”
Nailed it.
