Dumb Money (2023)

To be perfectly honest, I have never quite understood how you could make money buying stock in a company that you actually wanted to go bust! I watched this and I'm still not really any the wiser. It all centres around the internet influencer Keith Gill (Paul Dano) who quite fancied the undervalued stock in a video game store called "GameStop". He started to suggest to his followers that this was a decent buy - despite the fairly obvious fact that the venture capitalists were selling the company short with a view to it collapsing. Slowly but surely the word spreads and the stock starts to rise. What now ensues is a worm that turns story as the gazillionaires at their polo clubs find these gadfly small investors really are becoming a fly in their vichyssoise. Can the little guy prevail? This is quite an enjoyably paced drama with it's roots in reality but for me, the acting was really lacklustre and it drew a really simplistically linear distinction between the have and the have nots that didn't really intrigue my brain. It certainly demonstrates the power of the internet and that galvanising the population can easily buck some established business practices but somehow I didn't especially admire the little guys here either - they were to varying degrees just as aspirational, wanted what the rich guys had and didn't much care how they got it! Still, it's enjoyable enough to watch but I'd wait til it is on the television