Late Review: Inside Job

Inside Job has been out for over a week and was probably about to disappear from cinemas forever until it was proclaimed as the Greatest Documentary Of All Time Well Of The Last Twelve Months Anyway on Sunday night by Team Oscar. It must be counting its blessings (and its takings), being as it is a documentary about the global economic crisis and therefore unlikely to have caused the kind of queues we saw when E.T. was released.

In order to attract a wider audience, it's narrated by Matt Damon. It's almost as if a line-up of near-identical men in suits talking about Credit Default Swaps and Collateralised Debt Obligations isn't exciting enough for modern audiences.

Sadly at no point does Matt Damon beat a Wall Street banker into a bloody pulp with a lollipop stick before leaping out of a 78-storey high window onto a moving train which he then commandeers, drives straight into the Federal Reserve Bank and causes to explode before banging his head on the corner of a desk and forgetting everything that just happened. It's really not that kind of film.

However, if you're interested in how the "current climate" that people keep using as an excuse not to have dessert in restaurants came about, who's largely responsible for it and why it's not about to get any better, then Inside Job has all that and more.

Sadly, as with most documentaries trying to prove a point, it's edited in such a way that anyone who's suffered as a result of the crisis gets their point put across clearly and succinctly, whereas anyone deemed to be A Bad Guy gets all their ums, ers, awkward twitches and shifty glances left in so we can watch them squirm. That's not to say they don't deserve such treatment but it makes it difficult to believe you're watching a balanced depiction of events, which is a shame because producer / director Charles Ferguson is clearly an intelligent man who knows what he's on about.

Still, its 120 minutes go by in what feels like about 109, and if you can tell when you're being manipulated by a filmmaker and can keep up with what you're being told and not get distracted by the man two rows behind heartily snoring, then Inside Job is probably worth a watch.