CREDIT: Magnolia Pictures

This review was originally posted on News Cult in March 2018.

Starring: Dan David, Matthew Wiechert, Carson Block, James Chanos, Soren Aandahl, Maj Soueidan

Director: Jed Rothstein

Running Time: 84 Minutes

Rating: R for Profanity That is Surely a Lot Less Offensive Than the Crimes on Display

Release Date: March 30, 2018 (Limited Theatrically and On Demand)

If you loved The Big Short, The China Hustle is now here to give you the same semi-invigorating feelings of cynical helplessness, but with more of a obscure bent. This is a documentary, as opposed to a based-on-real-events fictionalized narrative with frequent fourth-wall breaking, but everything is still plenty topsy-turvy. Docs about global financial fraud have been a bit of a staple at least as far back as 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron’s director, Alex Gibney, serves as an executive producer on China Hustle). So, disgusting corporate behavior has been going on for a while now, but at least as of 10-15 years ago, it seemed like it was easy to understand. Back then it was just about cooking about the books and reporting false profits. But now, the reporting in The China Hustle is needed not just to expose today’s malfeasance but also to explain what the hell it even is.

The fraud at the center of The China Hustle is the reverse merger, wherein Chinese companies replace defunct, but still existing, American companies and then take their place on the stock exchange. They then have the cachet of a name and stature that allows them to be traded like hot commodities without having to be profitable or even really conducting themselves like an actual business. A trip to one supposedly booming Chinese company turns up little more than a trash heap. With the tension simmering at a steady boil the whole running time, the proceedings are wrapped up with pronouncements about how it is “not illegal to steal from foreign investors” in China and that the country is “fundamentally a broken or fucked-up society.” I would be interested in a response from within China to all this, but when you have two societies playing by profoundly different rules tangled up with each other, these dirty tricks are bound to happen.

The China Hustle is primarily a talking heads doc, and most of the interviewees come off as shell-shocked at the fraud they have mucked through. The main personality that emerges is Philadelphia-area investor Dan David, who intones at the start, “There are no good guys in this story. Including me.” He plays much the same role as Steve Carell in The Big Short, making a killing off shorting the Chinese junk but turning into an activist once he reckons with the consequences that so many individuals have suffered at the hands of a rigged system. The most resonant moment involves David explaining the whole mess to his family during a backyard barbeque. These globalized schemes have not ruined good simple family hangout time, but they have occasionally cast an absurd, ethereal pall over them.

The China Hustle is Recommended If You Like: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Big Short, Inside Job

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Reverse Mergers