SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Pluskylang Great Film overall

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

SnoopyStyle It's early 2008 and Lehman Brothers is falling. CEO Dick Fuld (James Woods) is stand-fast as he rejects an offer from Warren Buffett. He's not willing to sell low as he expects to weather the storm. A few months later, Lehman Brothers is collapsing. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson (William Hurt), Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and President of the New York Fed Tim Geithner among others are struggling to gather private interests to bail out the failing investment bank as the contagion spreads.The actors are first rate. I assume the writing is well-researched. It's a relatively clear telling of the events. As a narrative, it does lack the tension of an unknown story and the clarity of one lead character. This is a good companion piece to other docs about the subject.

blanche-2 "Let's see," says PR person Michele Davis, played by Cynthia Nixon, "we can't put any more restrictions on the way the banks are going to spend the $125 billion we're giving them, because they might not TAKE it?" Yeah, Michele, if you tell them they can't pay big fat bonuses with it and fund golden parachutes, they won't take it.We all know that the banks were bailed out, and "Too Big To Fail" purports to tell us the real story. It doesn't because in order for it to be a movie, there have to be good guys and bad guys. Since it was all bad guys, it's a little skewered.The good guy of the piece is that hard-working Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, beautifully portrayed by William Hurt. In the story, Paulson nearly has a nervous breakdown trying to save the world economy after investment companies start going bankrupt.It's pointed out that Paulson has no conflict of interest even though he used to run Goldman Sachs because he dumped his stock in the company. That's true. Not mentioned was that for some reason he didn't have to pay any taxes on the sale, something like $50 million.Then we get to the let's bail out AIG because they're in bed with everybody. Yeah. Their big creditor was Goldman Sachs. Paulson cheated the taxpayers out of $75 billion because, in order for Goldman to get all their money, he didn't negotiate the bailout.He's the big hero, the one whose wife (Kathy Baker) tells him he's taking on too much. So you can imagine what the rest of this movie was like when we got down to the real bad guys, the banks.Many people in the film ask, why didn't anyone see this coming? I have some other questions. Why didn't anyone know Bernie Madoff was a crook? Why didn't anyone know banks were lending money to dummy corporations at Enron? Paulson gives us the answer, "They were all making too much money, so nobody asked." The thieves, liars, guys with their heads in the sand, helpers, and pacifiers were played by a wonderful cast: John Hurd, James Wood, Billy Crudupp, Tony Shalhoub, Paul Giamatti, Cynthia Nixon, and Ed Asner. Asner played Warren Buffett, the only one with any money. As Ben Bernanke, Paul Giametti gives another standout performance.Curtis Hanson did a brilliant job of directing -- one felt the tension and suspense every step of the way.On a final note, the banks were given money so they could loan it out. Instead, they loaned out less. Their bonuses reached a peak in 2010, the highest amounts ever. Mattresses are looking better and better.

nikolaskjeldsen HBO and Peter Gould did a disservice to the American people by stuffing their nose up the ass of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve bank by not even coming close to laying blame where it belongs. The film is almost comical in its representation of Paulsen, Bernanke and Geithner. All three of these clowns are characterized as heroic as they struggle to save the American economy from collapsing. The film is mostly fiction and is clearly an attempt to hide the truth from the American people. I would recommend watching a more truthful depiction of what actually happened, as for example "Inside Job" which is actually a documentary and not a fictional representation. This is all in all, nothing but propaganda.

roper1-110-4447 You can look at a movie like this two ways: as an accurate representation of the source and as a piece of drama. Too Big To Fail is not too big to fail on both counts.I should have known to expect with a cast that sports the likes of Ed Asner, but the degree of the left-wing Hollywood spin that they put on the story was stilling annoying. They just can't let go of a chance push their ant-business agenda, even if it means inventing new scenes and even directly contradicting the source book itself. Talking about painting the lilly! Exhibit #1: There was an invented scene about 2/3 of the way through the film apparently designed to explain the roots of the calamity. They throw around terms like CDO and CDS so fast that anyone unfamiliar with the book and the background to the financial crisis would have no clue what they were talking about. They then whitewash the home owners as victims, just poor dupes swindled by the unethical mortgage brokers. In reality, of course, many of these were greedy people living way beyond their means using their houses as piggy banks while many others were pure speculators. We don't hear anything blame about the likes of left wing heroes Barney Frank and Charles Shumer who lit the fuse on the whole mess by demanding that banks make mortgages available to the poor. There is not a word about the Quants whose unrealistic risk models told bankers that such a disaster could never happen. We don't hear about the corruption of the ratings agencies, collapse of the carry trade, etc. No, there is only room for one villain in the Hollywood left villain pantheon – big business CEO's.Exhibit #2: The ending is another invented scene that is thoroughly misleading. They have Paulson pleading that he hopes that the banks will lend out the TARP money as intended to stimulate the economy. Then there is a prologue saying that the banks didn't. This is pure rubbish. In the book, Sorkin makes it perfectly clear that this was not the purpose of TARP. It was to stabilize the financial world by injecting capital to deleverage the banks and to rebuild investor confidence. The banks could not lend money because it would push their leverage back up. But Hollywood isn't interested in what Sorkin said, if they can take another parting potshot at big business.Leftwing distortions aside, Too Big To Fail was simply very dull. For a while, it is amusing to see actors who look so much like their real-life counterparts, especially Paul Giamati as a Ben Bernanke clone and Evan Handler's amazing resemblance to Lloyd Blankfeld. But the characters are uniformly dull. Even scene that should be great theater (e. g., Paulson kneeling before Nancy Pelosi) come across a dead and perfunctory. The only breaking in the dullness is James Woods' way over the top portrayal of Dick Fuld. It bordered on comic relief.The book just didn't work as a movie. The book was a series of vignettes, whose complexity reflected the complexity of the actual crisis. The story lurches from vignette to vignette with not real plot or story developing. Further, the need to boil the book down into typical movie running time also meant that they drastically has to simply and shorten many of the events to the point of losing the real story. The collapse was not the kind of linear event that works on the screen.In sum, the movie fails as both history and as drama. A much better movie about the financial disaster could have been made from Michael Lewis's highly entertaining "The Big Short," that amusingly tells the story from the viewpoint of a few quirky Wall Street outsiders who saw the collapse coming and the problems that they encountered by running contrary to popular wisdom. It's the same story, but a lot more fun. But there would have been some sympathetic businessmen characters. The Hollywood lefties wouldn't want that.