21. Margin Call (2011)
There’s a lot of components to making a great film, but for the purposes of these mini-reviews I mainly look at three things: acting, direction, and writing. This film had two of the three, acting and directing, but it had one of the most boring scripts I’ve had the chance of observing in a long time. I may be a little biased, as I’m finding movies about the market crash to be a bit tedious, but this film was just turgid mess. When the characters weren’t talking about the money they were going to lose, they were talking about the money they make, or the money that someone else makes, or the money that their rich boss makes etc.
Admittedly the acting for the most part was great. Tucci could dramatically read the phone book and I’d be happy. Irons is a master of creating suspense with his voice alone. Perhaps someone should tell Spacey that he can do more than be agitated though, and that yelling everything isn’t always acting; however, he does get a great scene at the very end, which was perhaps my favorite part of the movie.
I don’t know, I was just bored by this film, and it didn’t seem to present me any new information on the causes of the recession. It’s mostly just a rehash of what everyone already knows with some two dimensionally written characters thrown in to boot.
2 out of 5 stuffs
