Shadows on the Wall

Bull Run

dir-scr Alfredo Barrios Jr
prd Bill Keenan, Howard Baldwin, Karen Baldwin, William J Immerman, Doug Ellin
with Tom Blyth, Chris Diamantopoulos, Jordyn Denning, Brandon Engman, Zach Villa, Ashwin Gore, Alyshia Ochse, Jay Mohr, Troy Garity, Sam Daly, Helena Mattsson, Trevor Gretzky
release UK 14.Nov.25
24/US 1h39

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Based on a true story, this financial comedy works overtime to recreate the snappy attitude of The Wolf of Wall Street, with pulsing music, quick-cut editing, on-screen titles and to-camera explanations. But no amount of eye-catching trickery can make a movie about banking even remotely involving. It's a flashy film with a solid cast and superb blackly comical moments, but it's virtually impossible to care about anything that happens.

Working in an investment bullpen, Bobby (Blyth) is navigating the office culture when he gets a chance to prove himself on a big project, working with his mercurial boss Masterson (Diamantopoulos). He has also just started a relationship with his office crush Michelle (Denning). In all of this, Bobby is distracted by thoughts that a colleague (Daly) might have killed himself due to this project, and now an executive (Ochse) is outrageously flirting with him. The question is whether all of this is a set up to ruin his career even before it gets started.

In the office, Bobby and his colleagues (Villa, Gore, Engman and Mohr) act like sitcom chuckleheads, constantly teasing each other and engaging in silly banter like teenagers who refuse to grow up. But even this comedy is heavily financial in nature, delivered with the usual annoying over-confidence of young men in sharp suits. It's deliberate that Bobby is never seen at home, as his work is his life.

At the centre, Blyth is at least likeable, even with his relentless financial patter and flippant personal dilemmas. Pretty much everyone else on-screen is insufferably smug, most notably Diamantopoulos' smirking egomaniac, who remains vicious even when his veneer cracks. While Denning and Ochse are both playing strong-willed women, any layers in the characters are thanks to the actors rather than the screenplay.

It's unclear what point this movie is trying to make. It does effectively point out that the entire investment banking industry is a leech on the system, making money on work other people do. So we perhaps didn't need to be told that it's such a cutthroat, amoral place to work. These things might be important to people involved in finance, but for anyone else, it's just a blur of words spoken by people who have no reason to live beyond making money.

themes, language, violence 12.Nov.25

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