Working with editor Hank Crowin, writer/director Adam McKay doesn’t care about hiding anything. Voices with no lip movement, lip movment with no voices, characters jumping in their chairs on either side of a cut, the movie reads almost as a schizophrenic clicking through of a scene’s rushes. Initially, it’s jarring. We like the smooth edges of the typical cut. But frankly this isn’t a movie about giving us what we like. Instead, it gives the audience insight: it removes the magic and mystique of the whole process. It takes them into the editing room and says “Well shit, this is how we did it.”

Adapted from the book of the same name, The Big Short gives three separate narrative perspectives on the 2008 sub-prime mortage crisis that essentially crippled the world ecomony. The stories are relatively tropic in that they’re basically: 1) the disabled genius, 2) the ensemble comedy, and 3) the buddy comedy. The typical movie would have only focussed on one to give the audience beats to connect with the characters more through personal struggles and romantic relationships and beats where the econobabble is absent, all the while using a financial crisis as something that just happens and not something anyone could understand. But not here. With the exception of a handful of scenes concerning the protagonist of one of these three stories, the typical emotional engine is absent. Instead, we just get a whole lot of people talking about a whole lot of stuff that to those in the theatre probably meant a whole lot of nothing.