Seth Rogen speaking at the 2016 San Diego Comic Con International. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Seth Rogen is very good at playing weed-smoking, bumbling idiots. He is a fine actor who also has done some more serious roles.

Dumb Money is a film that chronicles the David vs. Goliath battle of an unknown investment trader, named Keith Gill, who took a gamble on GameStop stock, and wound up firing a great shot against Gabe Plotkin, the founder of Melvin Capital. I was excited to see Rogen as Plotkin.

The first scam is that Rogen gets very little screen time. Secondly, he looks and sounds nothing like Plotkin. Rogen plays the same silly character he always does, minus the weed, so we are supposed to believe a total fool can head a hedge fund and have a net worth of $400 million? And on top of that, we see Plotkin wearing a yarmulke for about two seconds. If you blink, you’ll miss it. There is no explanation of if it was a holiday, Shabbat, or what was going on.

I read the book by Jewish author Ben Mezrich that the film is based on. Here’s a small part of it: “Gabe Plotkin’s world was coming to an end. His tailored Oxford shirt was soaked through, his tie felt like a noose around his neck…”

Unfortunately, that tension is not transferred from the book to the movie.

We also learn that Plotkin got antisemitic messages. How about we see the character react to them and reflect on this? Nope. We only get a character who has never met Plotkin talking about this in passing as a throwaway line. This blunts the importance.

Is Rogen’s performance somewhat entertaining? Yes. But it’s not near what it should be.

I was also excited to see current Mets owner Steve Cohen, who infused a few billion into Melvin Capital, played by actor Vincent D’Onofrio. Unfortunately, the character is as flat as Kyrie Irving thinks the world is.

Paul Dano is fantastic as Keith, an unassuming guy who vlogs and inspires people on WallStreetBets, an online page of young enthusiasts who sometimes make inappropriate comments. The gist is this: when you short a stock, as Plotkin did, you are betting that the price won’t shoot up; if it does, your losses can be infinite. GameStop went as high as $86.88 on January 27, 2021.

Because of its short positions, and then the actions of Reddit traders, Melvin Capital lost $7 billion and eventually shut down, while Gill and those who jumped in got rich.

Pete Davidson is hysterical as Keith’s brother, but he also doesn’t get enough screen time.

It is truly amazing that Keith’s gambit worked, despite some shady moves, like the Robin Hood app shutting down the Buy option for a time and WallSreetBets getting shut down supposedly for foul language right when the stock was soaring, even though it was the same language for quite some time. There were Congressional hearings, but nobody went to jail.

Dano and Davidson are enough to make the film a fun watch. But it’s nearly criminal that Rogen isn’t used in a much bigger way and properly.

Both wives — Keith’s, played by Shailene Woodley, and Gabe’s, played by Olivia Thirlby — do almost nothing and don’t seem to care about anything at all.

Dumb Money would have been smarter to go into more depth, but one can sense the feeling was that an underdog story starring Rogen as a joker was thought to be a safe bet.

The author is a writer based in New York.