The Big Short starring Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt

With: Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt

Runtime: 130 minutes Four stars

THERE has been no end of serious articles, learned tomes and chin-stroking documentaries about the financial meltdown of 2008, but what do you know, it has taken the director of Anchorman to nail the guilty men and women in the whipsmart and wickedly amusing financial comedy The Big Short. Yes, you read that right - finance and comedy in the same sentence.

Using some highly unorthodox teaching methods, Adam McKay shows how Western bankers did not, like Ron Burgundy and San Diego, stay classy, and how we all paid for it, and are still paying. Like the film says at the outset, all of what you see over the next 130 minutes is based on a true story. Unfortunately.

If the cast is not enough of a mark of quality - Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt (also a producer), and at one point our own Karen Gillan - the film hails from the book by Michael Lewis, the author who is to charting the ways of modern capitalism what Dickens was to skewering the Victorian era.

Lewis, and in turn McKay and his screenwriter Charles Randolph (who both account for two of the film’s five Oscar nominations), show where the financial crisis started, how it was allowed to gather speed, and why no-one did anything about it until it was too late.

They do so via three interlocking tales. In one, wunderkind financier Michael Burry (Bale, nominated for best supporting actor) sees a failing in the sub-prime mortgage market that a smart man could make billions from. Also on the case are two whizz kids working out of a garage who are being mentored by drop-out financier Ben Rickert (Pitt). The third strand focuses on a posse of hedge fund operatives which includes Steve Carell as a magnificently curmudgeonly dealer, and Ryan Gosling as a mercurial young buck. All three parties see a way of selling short and winning big, and with the odd exception are not too fussed about the consequences.

Perhaps the thought of mortgage bonds, selling short, derivatives and all the rest of the voodoo economics that lie behind the stock market leaves you feeling cold and confused. Fear not, for McKay has that covered. When his firecracker cast are not quite up to the job of explaining what is going on, McKay turns to more audience friendly teachers such as Margot Robbie in a bubblebath, or Anthony Bourdain at his chopping board. Through them, the big cons are revealed in all their grubby glory. This is smartening up, the opposite of dumbing down, and it works a treat (though one does hope Robert Peston does not take up the bubble bath idea).

McKay does not entirely call the pacing right, with the film at one point appearing to make a dash for the finish only to dawdle around and lose momentum. But fair play to the director of The Other Guys and Step Brothers, he has taken apart a complex story and reassembled it in a way that leaves one equal parts infuriated, enlightened, entertained, and amused. Along the way he piles in enough slick dialogue to choke a London Whale.

Lewis and Pitt showed in Moneyball, a movie about baseball stats and assembling the right squad, that they are a terrific team when it comes to making thrilling cinema out of the most unlikely material. In the Big Short they've hit it out the park again.