While each character provides different circumstances, you are judging them just as much as the banks for their hypocrisy and questionable morals. There is no way that this film allows you to appreciate any enjoyment from the opportunist’s success.

When it dawns on the two that families, jobs and homes will be lost in the millions, the gain becomes empty and less meaningful. The emptiness is presented from the characters Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, who find themselves with the help and assistance of retired trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to make a sizeable profit. The movie displays that in times of crisis there is always an opportunity to exploit, but at the same time, it also teaches us that in the end when you are victorious it can feel so empty. Instead, you feel intrigued with the events leading up to 2008. The Big Short fancies itself as a comedy, yet its educational themes do not allow you to giggle much. The opportunists appear to be religious preachers discussing a taboo that the housing market is a bubble which will pop at any moment, while the traders at the bottom laugh and their clueless manager above them appear smug. The traders, bankers, and lenders are presented as braggers with no care for the law, so naturally, you feel no sympathy as 2008 edges closer in the narrative. Do you feel sorry for any of the oblivious swaggering Wall Street traders in this film having no clue of the impending collapse? No, and this is because The Big Short only wants you to see it from the perspective of the four outsiders who look increasingly crazy at their report of the housing forecast. The film represents that greed infects the banks, and that turned into a spiral of doom which unloaded onto the lower classes. If miserableness is the feeling when exploiting a financial opportunity than I never want to be a part of it.

If I’m honest, the opportunists in The Big Short look miserable. What’s stranger in this movie is that it does not dazzle you with a group of characters enjoying life and making use of an opportunity. I never thought I would come across a film that stank of money and emptiness more than The Wolf of Wall Street.

The big short characters