Review for Inside Job

Inside Man is not a film I'd watch again, but it is certainly a film that I'm glad I watched and will recommend to everyone to watch. Though I do recommend that after you watch don't enter a bank afterwards or it may make you very angry.Inside Job is a film that made me incredibly sad and mad after watching. In 2008, I left my job and decided to go back to my home town for a better life. There was just one problem. Two weeks after returning to my home town, the credit crunch hit. Stores that had been in existence for over a hundred years died. Jobs dried up and it seemed that there was no one hiring. The economy not just of the UK, but of the world crashed to the point of being frightening. Every week a company was declaring itself bankrupt.

It took me a good few months to get another job and this saw me having to exist on the savings I had been collecting for the past two years. I just didn't understand how this could all happen. This film gave me all the answers as to why this happened. This wasn't the clever Wall Street world that Oliver Stone taught me about, or even the stupidity of the Nick Leeson incident, this was a corrupt system that had multiple opportunities to halt the crash, but instead just saw the dollar signs and kept on going. The people who suffered? Just ordinary people. People who had trusted banks with their mortgages and savings that now saw it all disappear.

The banks and investors also took hits, but listening to them inform me that one earned $580 Million in one year makes me think that if he had to take a pay cut the next year it wouldn't exactly see him on a Sunday cutting out coupons. Narrated by Matt Damon Inside Job is a mix of interviews and archive footage to tell the story. Split into a number of sections, the film looks at the rise and fall of the global economy. The film is fascinating and though most of the financial jargon went over my head, the facts and figures of how much money was being made and being lost was amazing. As the film continues you wonder how on earth it got this far and it answers the question simply: Money. It was all about money. Even when financial experts warned of the problems, they were usually silenced or ignored.

One of the best scenes involves a Congressional hearing where a number of top financial executives had to explain an email stating that an investment 'was crap'. Despite the fact they were still trying to sell it. The sight of these people, who probably earned millions or even billions selling this 'crap', squirming and trying to avoid answering questions, was perfect. This happens a number of times in the film and watching these people squirm over the rights and wrongs and of who is to blame is what makes this film both enjoyable and frustrating to watch. Though the film blatantly points out who are to blame, no one accepts any of it.

The DVD includes a number of Deleted Scenes, Making of and a Commentary. All of these support the feature and it is surprising that they didn't splice the deleted scenes into the main feature as an 'extended cut'. The commentary is fascinating and the amount of work that went into this film makes me believe that it thoroughly deserved its Academy Award for Best Documentary.