Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Fantastic!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

What I don't understand is, why the movie followed the Treasury Secretary? Why didn't it follow the Federal Reserve Chairman? Why did it show the Treasury Secretary talking and working with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York? Why Wouldn't the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's boss, the Federal Reserve Chairman, talk to and work with him? Also, the Federal Reserve Chairman spent his academic career studying the (previous) Great Depression. He would have the best understanding of what to do.

The year 2008 is a distant memory for many things, but for the financial crisis of 2008 it seems just so very recent. This movie, "Too Big To Fail", uses all the real people involved, and likely all the real dialog the filmmakers could dig up. The result is a very realistic, very chilling snapshot of how financial institutions can make or break our economy and our lives.I am retired, in late 2007 and into 2008 I had a pretty big chunk of my savings in stock market related investments. When the financial markets started falling, then falling more, then almost dropping off a cliff, it was very worrying to think every thing I had spent 30+ years saving up might be worth almost nothing. Seeing this movie gives great insight into what all went on to create the crisis, then to help it level out and eventually start to recover.Many characters are played by excellent, experienced actors, but the prime focus is William Hurt who does a super job as Henry Paulson , US Secretary of the Treasury. While he had no direct authority to make the large banks take actions that he and his team of specialists thought best, he had a tremendously persuasive position.After a number of attempts to get a solution, the last desperate act was to get Congress to approve a $700Billion package that would be used as a stimulus, to selected banks, to encourage them to begin lending again. For without lending the economy could not hope to recover.The news of that caused the stock markets to stabilize, with renewed investor confidence, and set the stage for a recovery. Ironically, the banks did NOT resume lending right away, but it was the news, the promise of better days that sparked the improvement.The great news is that now 4 1/2 years down the road, the stock markets have reached new historical highs and unemployment continues to drop. There is no guarantee it will continue for long, but at least the indications are that the crisis is behind us.

This was a fantastic view on the internal workings of the 2008 crisis. Not since the west wing have we seen such excellent political drama. It may not of been perfectly accurate in terms of how things took place but the humanization of tight dialogue of those involved displayed an intelligent and brilliant representation. This would have been a top class thriller if it wasn't so real. The calculated building of tension and the memory of how things took place left the viewer both shocked and tense at the knife edge that we were balancing upon, the relief short lived with the knowledge that we continue in a world where similar issues and the fallout are still so relevant.

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.