[Movie] MARGIN CALL

Those who make the big money are not the ones that puts a lot of time into the business; they do more thinking, as well as the decision-making, while the muscles and brains do the rest. You have to be ruthless to make the big bucks; having a conscience limits your ability to make it big in the world. They say there is no good money anywhere, but who really knows what they're talking about?

“There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter or cheat” John Tuld.

Margin Call is a 2011 American financial movie thriller written and directed by J.C Chandor, starring Stanley Tucci as Eric Dale, Kevin Spacey as Sam Rogers, Jeremy Irons as John Tuld, Paul Bettany as Will Emerson and Zachary Quinto as Peter Sullivan, along with other supporting actors.

A Wall Street investment bank, trying to lay down staff, lays off one of its risk managers, who was working on something and has yet to figure it out. While leaving, he hands over the file to a junior analyst, who will figure out the challenge and sound the alarm to his boss about the volatile position the firm is currently in.

Peter Sullivan, who Zachary Quinto played, finds that the firm’s trading models are overleveraged in its mortgage-backed securities; if the value drops just a little, it could lead to a loss that is more than the entire market value of the company.

The movie shows the typical scenario of the daily happenings in Wall Street, while the firm is all about buying and selling, Kevin Spacey played by Sam Rogers, will face a type of market situation he has never seen in the entirety of his 34 years of experience working in the stock market industry as well as the floor manager, he will be force to motivate his sub-ordinates against his will since he has the believe and live to the standard that he only sells what people will come back and ask for more.

The movie show how the labour market is, showing how it sometimes doesn’t matter what you studied, examples of which were Peter Sullivan who has a doctorate in Rocket Science, Eric Dale who worked construction and many others, what matters mostly is how one can apply their skills in various other means and the motivation to that is usually where the big bucks is and not some passion of some sort.

The movie depicts what human survival is; it is a jungle out there: either you beat or be beaten; there are no feelings in business; you take what you can take and apologise later if you want to make the money.

All cast in the movie played their parts wonderfully well, ranging from Jerry Irons who casted as John Tuld, the ruthless CEO who came in on a helicopter after he was informed of what was about to happen to his firm, to Simon Baker who played Jared Cohen the Manager who depicted his panic scene very well.

It’s a recommendation for people who love financial movies and want to know more about the financial crisis of 2008. The movie is more about the cost of survival in the risk business rather than numbers.

Images from IMDb

Rating: 85/100

Originally posted through scrobble.life/movies.