Bull Run Review: Tom Blyth Stars In A Wolf Of Wall Street Ripoff That Is A Robbery Of Your Time

Alfredo Barrios Jr.’s Bull Runis so derivative of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short that it almost feels like it was an assignment in a bad film class — “make something in the style of Martin Scorsese.” Taking place in a high-octane Wall Street investment banking firm that more resembles a frat house, the film is so non-distinctive that even its title cards look like it was made in a beta version of iMovie. Given the film’s influences, you’d think Barrios Jr. would at least give his film a stab at anything moralistic, political, or sociological; instead, it just seems like the first-time filmmaker might think this decidedly hollow world is cool.

Bull Run is based on the memoir Discussion Materials: Tales of a Rookie Wall Street Investment Banker by Bill Keenan, who co-wrote the adaptation with Barrios Jr., and at least they were smart enough to move away from the book’s clunky, overlong title. But that seems to be the film’s only innovation. At the center of this heartless tale is Bobby Sanders (Tom Blyth), a former hockey player turned junior executive who seems pretty apathetic to the world of high finance. Blyth is a strong actor, but the character mugs at the camera more than Jim from The Office, and most of the film is told through his incessant voiceover and unmotivated breaking of the fourth wall.

Bull Run Is Completely Devoid Of Substance

Early on, his mentor, Chandler (Sam Daly), dies by suicide, and it makes Sanders spiral into an existential hole of questioning. Well, not really, but that is what we’re told we’re about to watch. What we instead witness is an endless stream of vignettes of Sanders half-assing his job, romancing an analyst, Michelle (Jordyn Denning), and playing practical jokes on his royally wealthy co-worker Farouk (Ashwin Gore). If he is internally tormented about the meaninglessness of his uber-capitalist job, that moral reckoning is nowhere to be seen on the screen, except for one night with Michelle where he admits that he’s not motivated by much these days.

Anyway, Sanders finds himself the point man in a potential IPO with a coal company that is reticent to go public until he gets them to believe in a lot of malarkey. The whole film is malarkey. It’s a veritable festival of malarkey. Nearly every line of dialogue is corporate finance gobbledygook, which is, to be fair, partly what Keenan and Barrios Jr. want to highlight. The people in charge of our economy know nothing; they are just very good at bullsh*tting. But it gets exhausting fast to watch it; in The Big Short a lot of that gets translated to help us understand the inherent greed that caused the financial collapse. Here it’s just noise.

Bull Run is so devoid of substance that much of it is taped together with ironic usage of stock photos and archival footage, as if to constantly point at the vapidity of its own enterprise. Yes, this is all a commentary on the very world it is criticizing, but when that critique is as vague as it is, you just inadvertently call out your own crap. And that’s the fundamental flaw of the film: it traffics in the same stuff it thinks it’s calling out. It’s like doing a line of cocaine to prove that doing drugs is dangerous.