I.O.U.S.A. (2008)--2/5

Patrick Creadon, the director of "Wordplay," shifts into low gear with "I.O.U.S.A.," a soporific exposé of our country's financial woes. The film readily admits that this is a topic that doesn't get enough press--a local story on an important? town hall meeting is bumped from the newscast for the usual treacle. And Robert Bixby, the perennially ruffled executive director of the non-partisan Concord Coalition, admits that his message is "unsexy."

"I.O.U.S.A." tries to sex up both complicated and obvious axioms with fancy animated pie charts and bar graphs. They all--shockingly!--predict a dire future for the country. (The future we're living in, as the film was made in 2007/2008.) Every five minutes, it's like the irritating part in "An Inconvenient Truth" in which Al Gore rides an industrial lift in order to illustrate his point.

Reductionism is often a fault of movies, but "I.O.U.S.A." fails because it doesn't do it enough. Creadon crams too many concepts into a slim runtime. I'm not asking for him to dumb down the material, but rather to keep only the biggest ideas or to slow down complex narration. (Okay, maybe I am asking him to dumb it down.) "I.O.U.S.A." tries and fails to be a populist reference on the economy.