By Dylan Huber

“Dumb Money,” directed by Craig Gillespsie, is an entertaining, though fatally limited, portrayal of the events which shocked Wall Street and the world. The movie, based on a true story, follows the leader of a community of Redditors on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, Keith Gill (Paul Dano). Joined by a coalition of assorted internet dwellers from TikTok and beyond, he led the group to continually invest in Gamestop, which Wall Street was predicting would fail. 

Keith Gill is an average, cat-loving father with a personal hobby of investing in stocks and telling the Internet about his investments. This previously small-time hobby grows into a full-time passion once Keith becomes the leader of the movement to continually invest in Gamestop. On the other side of the equation, hedge-fund CEO Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) acts as his cosmic opposite: a wealthy man who earns money when companies fail. 

Dano puts on a particularly strong performance, embracing the strange unification of the esoteric peculiarity imbued into everyone who browses Reddit and the demeanor of one who’s nonetheless somewhat detached from the Internet. Rogen, in addition, plays the part of an overconfident yet all too easily panicked Wall Street CEO quite well. Indeed, if the movie were only an exploration of these two characters and their individual journeys, constantly juxtaposing them as they battle each other in completely different worlds, it would suffice. Unfortunately, the film does not deliver on this.

Besides the storylines of the two aforementioned characters, the film also follows Jennifer Campbell (America Ferrera), an essential hospital worker barely making a living wage, Harmony and Riri (Talia Ryder and Myhala Herrold), two broke college students, and Marcus (Anthony Ramos), a struggling GameStop employee. None of these stories are interconnected outside of the greater omnipresence of Keith’s GameStop movement. 

Although these characters’ individual stories and their relation to the overarching narrative may be conceptually interesting, they fall short of their potential. The film simply cannot overcome its self-imposed constraints of a runtime that’s far too short (at an hour and 40 minutes) to contain the side characters. Their stories either feel monotonously predictable (in the case of Marcus) or downright incomplete (in the case of Harmony, Riri, and Jennifer). Indeed, the screen time they do take up only hurts the more interesting characters by constantly cutting away from them, which therefore causes everyone in the film to lack intricacy. 

Since the movie is based on events that took place in 2021, and this film was released only two years later, the film cannot have any insight beyond the most reductionist “this event happened.” The gift of hindsight, which is inherently required to fully address, understand, and comment on both the event and the people involved within a biography, is entirely lacking. Thus, the film resigns itself to being an oftentimes lackluster, insipid retelling of factual events rather than an entertaining, nuanced plot.

“BlackBerry” which came out earlier this year has a similar narrative, as both involve economic rises and failures. Clearly, the two films share some DNA. They differ, however, where it truly matters. “BlackBerry” is longer (about two hours), while also focusing on a smaller cast of characters allowing their complexities to truly shine through. The film was also made well over a decade past its depicted happenings. 

“Dumb Money,” while fun at the very least, struggles to answer why it should be anything more than a Wikipedia article.