Most jarringly, the film is laced throughout with interstitials composed of montages of popular culture imagery (think Britney Spears on a talk show) interlaced with images of poverty (homeless people gathering under a bridge). The characters sometimes break the fourth wall, most frequently Jared Vennett, portrayed by Ryan Gosling and loosely based on Lippmann.

These unlikely celebrity cameos, scattered throughout the film, are purely expository McKays way of laying out complex jargon with a wink at the viewer but can feel downright silly, especially when actress Selena Gomez pops up out of nowhere to deliver a primer on synthetic CDOs. In another, attractive Australian actress Margot Robbie (who also appeared in The Wolf of Wall Street) describes subprime mortgages while reclining in a bubble bath and sipping champagne. In one scene, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, clad in his work whites, converts chopped-up day-old fish into a seafood stew to explain how toxic mortgages were converted into triple-A-rated CDOs. (I was surprised to see nudity in the first five minutes of a film ostensibly based on the implosion of CDOs.) And some of the narrative devices McKay uses to make the material more accessible and palatable can feel gimmicky. That said, it feels at times as if McKay is straining a little too hard to sex up the material, sometimes literally. The Big Short is far more entertaining than it has any right to be, given the byzantine financial structures it sets out to explain. But director Adam McKay has achieved just that with The Big Short, the film based on Michael Lewiss 2010 book of the same name that chronicled how a group of short-sellers Michael Burry of Scion Capital, Steve Eisman of FrontPoint Partners, James Mai and Charlie Ledley of Cornwall Capital and Deutsche Bank trader Greg Lippmann reaped huge financial rewards from the housing crisis by betting against the toxic collateralized debt obligations that were tied to garbage mortgages. Its no easy feat to explain in simple terms what caused the global economic collapse of 2008, let alone to craft it into an entertaining two-hour feature film.

The big short characters