'Too Big to Fail'

"Too Big to Fail," which premieres Monday on HBO, is the latest of that network's high-toned original films ("Recount," "The Late Shift," "From the Earth to the Moon," the upcoming "Game Change") in which a large cast of medium-big-to-big-named actors assume the skin of the real people to put you backstage at history. In this case — the story of the 2008 financial meltdown and the attempt to keep us all from ruin — the paint is barely dry on the actual events. Indeed, their ongoing consequences will affect the next election.

Directed by Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential," "8 Mile") from a screenplay by Peter Gould ("Breaking Bad") and based on Andrew Ross Sorkin's book of the same name, "Too Big to Fail" is pretty consistent low-key entertainment if not exactly enlightening (because it is an impersonation of the truth) or gripping (because we already know how it sort of ends). Structurally, it is a little like an episode of "House," a series of surgeries and injections requiring further surgeries and injections but without the tidy fourth-act cure, and a little like a disaster movie, where the disaster is still rumbling on at the movie's end, just not as awfully as it might have, and a little like a samurai movie, where the soldiers carry cellphones instead of swords, minus the action. Hanson's direction is admirably straightforward; he doesn't try to compensate for what is basically a story of rich white men talking about money with overcomposed or flashy visuals or an unsettling sound design.