Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gamestop: Rise of the Players’ on Hulu, an Entertaining Documentary in Which the Underdogs Topple the Evil Giant

Now on Hulu, Gamestop: Rise of the Players is a little people-vs.-the big guys, minnows-vs.-sharks, slingshots-vs.-tanks saga that you can’t help but cheer for, despite its rampant internetspeak. Don’t worry, though, this uptempo documentary about the nutzo Gamestop stock spike of 2021 balances out the “squoze”s and “dogecoin”s with equally irritating Wall Street jargon like “short squeeze” and “upside”/“downside,” framing users of the former as heroes and users of the latter as villains, as it damn well should be. In short: Fun doc, lotsa upside, here’s why.

GAMESTOP: RISE OF THE PLAYERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rise of the Players is one of those modern-style docs that opens with an ultra-hype montage promising lots of drama to come in the next 90 or so minutes. This one goes MEMES CRYPTO DARK WEB WALL STREET SHORT SQUEEZE OF ALL SHORT SQUEEZES and then starts introducing us to our protagonist collective, which ranges from a small-time financial manager to an unemployed dabbler in stocks to a guy who tweets against-the-grain investment advice to a game-tester-turned-YouTuber to a dufus who broadcast his running Wall Street commentary to an audience that barely hit double digits. They are all average people for the most part, with the internet self-broadcasters coming off slightly more annoying than the others, as you’d wholly expect.

These folks banded together in their belief that Gamestop didn’t completely suck ass. I mean, most of us already agree that this brick-and-mortar store with a zillion locations nationwide is horrible thanks to a business model that hinges on you trading in your physical copy of a video game for a miniscule fraction of what you originally paid for it. And in early 2020, the mainstream consensus on Gamestop was that its physical-media exchange model was the dinosaur and the digital download was the giant meteor hurtling towards the Yucatan. But there’s a big BUT here: Our crew of Gamestop cheerleaders asserted that they knew better than all the giganto hedge funds that were arrogantly betting billions on the company’s demise – a technique known as “shorting,” which usually works in their favor, but in this case should probably be called “sharting.”

So, yeah, guess what, the scrappy little loners were right. It took quite the lucky series of fortunate events, but they saw a lot of it coming. Contrary to popular reasoning, Covid didn’t destroy Gamestop as a retailer – it ratched up video game consumption and put high demand on new Xbox and Playstation console launches. And the normal folks with their feet on the ground and not elevatoring up Manhattan skyscrapers saw the company was catching up with the times by closing extraneous stores and diversifying its products (which led to a mega-deal with Microsoft). Before you know it, big-time investors were consulting the Gamestoperinos for advice, a ton of Reddit-chat micro-investors and the like jumped on the bandwagon, the stock value Apollo 11’d and the megarich people who “shorted” Gamestop ate some serious dookie. For once, the 99 percent won a damn battle. Hope lives on, baby.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take a Wall Street doc like Inside Job or and cross it with those about Incredibly Online people: A Glitch in the Matrix, You Can’t Kill Meme, Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King, etc. Please note that Gamestop: Rise of the Players is the best of the latter bunch. (Also: If you’ve seen Gamestopped, you’ll recognize all of the story beats.)

Performance Worth Watching: Of the original Gamestop crew, Jenn Kruza is the easiest to root for: Quit a job she didn’t like, dreamt of working in the music business, ended up moving back with her parents during Covid, crazy bet on Gamestop investment, went into debt, went into more debt after she needed chemotherapy for breast cancer, came out a winner in the end. Her story is a reminder that the world is not always a horrible place.

Memorable Dialogue: Two quotes that’ll drive you crazy for totally different reasons:

Good guy spewing ridiculousness: “This is the Chewyfication of Gamestop!”

Bad guy spewing hairsplitting bullshit: “I’m not a short seller. I’m an investor whose specialty happens to be short selling.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Oh no, not another movie that tries to make us barely-balancing-the-checkbook types understand how capital investment works, you may moan. Well, Rise of the Players is sort of that, but it’s less about Wall Street, more about how a handful of investor misfits ultimately outwitted people who thought they were smarter than everybody else. It’s hard not to side with the Bad News Bears, Slap Shotters and Rocky Balboas of this story, which is that much funnier because it involves a crappy stripmall hellstore everyone loves to hate, and ends with knowitalls not knowing it all, not in the least, one of who admits as much on camera so we end up disliking him a wee bit less.

Director Jonah Tulis doesn’t reinvent the form to tell the story, piecing together a narrative with the usual talking heads, archival footage and TV news clips. He’s savvy enough to keep relatively complex material digestible, emphasize the down-to-earth personalities of his protagonists and maintain an even, expeditious pace that’s more Super Mario-steady than Sonic the Hedgehog lickety-split-speedy. It’s an agreeable way to consume this modern American saga, far more so than every documentary’s nemesis, Wikipedia, which bogs us down with references to “everything bubble” and don’t-dare-click-it links that tempt us with ghastly assemblages of words like “See also: meme stocks.” The film gets just deep enough to keep us interested, but never so deep that we feel like we’re drowning in Leo gifs and NFT apes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Rise of the Players doesn’t get into the hoary context of the hellworld existing outside the goofy Gamestop yarn, but amidst vile political turmoil, mass virus death, brutal wars and the other sundry travesties, it’s nice to hear a true story in which the underdogs win.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.