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Dumb Money Movie Review

Dumb Money is a 2023 biographical dramedy film directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Paul Dano among many others. It is an uneven, but solidly made biopic.

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“I like the stock!“

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It tells the real life story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning the video game store GameStop into the world’s hottest company. This movie’s plot literally happened a couple of years ago during the pandemic. I remember vividly reading about it in the news. It is odd that they made a film so quickly after the real life event.

This means that with this movie we do not have the necessary historical context as the future is still ahead of us, so we don’t know how this event will affect the Wall Street economy in the near, let alone far future. With that being said, it’s a reasonably diverting biopic that is surprisingly comedic in its tone.

The highlight was that sense of humor that was sporadic, but definitely present in more than a couple of big scenes. Pete Davidson was typecast once again, but he was undeniably quite funny in most of his sequences and I loved his dynamic with Paul Dano, who was here also phenomenally cast as he fitted the role like a glove and delivered the movie’s best turn.

Unfortunately, all of the others failed to compare with those two as they were all rushed in their development and rather unimportant in the bigger scope of things. America Ferrera was solid and she got most to do while Seth Rogen was the clunkiest in a role where he didn’t know whether to go fully dramatic or somewhat comedic.

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Dumb Money has way too many of those unnecessary and plain overused media footage sections with the TikTok and YouTube videos being overwhelming throughout. The movie is well edited, but I would have personally cut those significantly and reduced the runtime by the additional ten or fifteen minutes. The film’s dialogue is actually terrific, the tone is diverse and the energy is quite kinetic, but there is a lack of stronger thematic or emotional resonance that prevailed throughout.