Critic
A Movie About the GameStop Short Squeeze Fails to Grip: Review
In seeking a moral stance, the new film misses the point of what really happened.
Pete Davidson and Paul Dano in Dumb Money.
Photographer: Claire Folger
For most people on Wall Street, the GameStop Corp. short squeeze of 2021 came out of nowhere. They watched in shock as a swarm of very online investors banded together to push the price of the video game vendor’s stock into the stratosphere.
In doing so, amateurs took down Melvin Capital Management, a high-flying hedge fund that had shorted the stock—that is, bet heavily on the price going down. For a fleeting moment, it was a breathtaking demonstration of the power of the internet and a manifestation of the public’s latent, burning hatred of post-2008 Wall Street.