This 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, with disapproval of his brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), and posting about it. Soon others who invest such as Jenny Campbell (America Ferrera), Marcus Garcia (Anthony Ramos) and others start to follow Keith and become interested. 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, including Steve Cohen (Vincent D'Onofrio), Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and others, fight back and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.
Others to round out the cast are Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin, Talia Ryder as Harmony Williams, Sebastian Stan as Vlad Tenev, Shailene Woodley as Caroline Gill, Keith's wife, Rushi Kota as Baiju Bhatt, Myha'la as Riri Pariseau, Kate Burton as Elaine Gill, Clancy Brown as Steve Gill, Dane DeHaan as Brad and Larry Owens as Chris.
This was directed with clarity and grit by Craig Gillespie ("Mr. Woodcock" '07, "Lars and the Real Girl" '07, "Fright Night" '11, "Trooper" (TV movie) '13, "Million Dollar Arm" '14, "The Finest Hours" '16, "I, Tonya" '17, "Cruella" '21) plus TV, music videos, videos and shorts. By his very resume, this filmmaker not only knows how to get his actors how to emit the certain emotions they need in order to convince the audience they are the person they are portraying, but also one cannot pigeon-hole this director simce he's worked on so many different types of films. His long illustrious career has given him an incredible showcase of his work and undoubtedly will see more work. In fact, his "Cruella 2" is in pre-production at this point. It was effectively written by virtual newcomers to feature films, Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (TV). considering they only have some TV experience under their belts, this was written fairly well. They appear to be a writing team because they worked on the same TV projects and they have a feature film that is in production called "Sue". This film suffered from the combination of a fair amount of choppiness and there were definitely a couple of slow places in script. I couldn't help but think of the the film, "The Wolf on Wall Street" as far as they were both about investing in the stock market and both writers in each film had to make sure the audience realized how questionable and/or bad these people were since the profane language was aplenty. Trust me, I'm not prudish, however, a handful of cuss words would've driven home the point that some of these people were bad. I actually felt uncomfortable after a point since they were so over-the-top with the profanity--it's like it would never end. All in all, this screenplay was effective and played well coming from a flashback format, if they could've just allowed more fluidity and a little less on the profane words. It's sad that the trailer showed so much promise since the premise was amazingly juicy, but this is where Hollywood should have paid a bit more money to get seasoned writers.
Trust me, this is not a wash--there were some very interesting and effective parts in this that truly needed to be said in a film, however it just needed more polish. The directing by Gillespie was riveting and the cast was really why you would see this--Paul Dano, America Ferrera, Vincent D'Onofrio and Seth Rogen were priceless in their roles.
Out of 4 Stars: 2.5 Rated: R 105mins.
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