REVIEW: Everyone Is Lying to You for Money [2026]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 90 minutes
Release Date: April 17th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: The Forge
Director(s): Ben McKenzie
Writer(s): Ben McKenzie / Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman (book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud)

It’s pretty stupid.

The title says it all: Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Even Ryan Atwood. Because Ben McKenzie is staging his reaction shots for comedy and buying his book and/or a ticket to this movie does put money in his pocket. Morena Baccarin’s funny quips may not be scripted, but we know she didn’t happen to film her husband the first time he saw Matt Damon’s crypto.com commercial. The movie’s final line even has Ben talking about shooting more “pick-ups.”

There is, however, a major difference between artistic license for entertainment purposes and orchestrating a full-on Ponzi scheme. Yes, parts of McKenzie’s investigation have been embellished, edited, and reenacted for maximum enjoyment because promising an audience a good time will make the vehicle that provides that experience more profitable. But he’s not stealing your money. He’s not asking you to invest in his film with an empty promise of a back-end cut.

He leaves that to the laundry list of bad actors (no pun intended since you don’t become “the O.C. guy” for the rest of your life without talent) he highlights, interviews, and exposes as the grifters they always were (often well before the media finally admits the truth). Guys like Alex Mashinsky promising an alternative bank, Nayib Bukele promising a shiny new metropolis, and Sam Bankman-Fried promising a better future fixing today’s crypto issues.

They each ultimately expose themselves. McKenzie’s skeptic merely caught onto their con early enough to leverage the general public’s perception that celebrities are inherently dumb into getting them a couple to do so on camera. And they do it willingly because they truly believe those lies are bigger than the truth. As McKenzie posits, some of them might even believe it too (definitely not Bukele, though, since his “cool dictator” schtick is pure malicious intent).

What makes McKenzie so good at this is the fact that he’s self-deprecating enough to understand this notion and intelligent enough with his economics background to coax honest answers (or enough nerves to make it impossible not to realize he’s being fed a lie). And while so many other known commodities take a paycheck to hock wares they don’t understand, he’s centering the impact of that endorsement on regular people who think they can trust Will Hunting.

But you can’t trust David Ortiz or Kevin O’Leary because they’re on your TV. Not when they have a fiduciary incentive to be misleading (wittingly or not). You therefore can’t also trust the so-called “disrupters” leading the charge to promote an unregulated system that they control and profit from. A system that they use real money to pay Ortiz and O’Leary to talk you into putting real money into the game in exchange for nothing but an empty promise.

Why can’t you trust them? McKenzie reveals the answer with the simple fact that every cog in the crypto puzzle that has failed so spectacularly in ways that threatened the viability of Wall Street itself were saved by the very establishment (your taxes) they said they not only didn’t need but were also better than. That’s why it’s so sad when he reveals just how little this truth matters in a world overtaken by influencers, parasocial relationships, and naïveté.

Even those bankrupted by these crypto entities still have faith in crypto. They will continue to gamble their very lives in a speculative market bolstered by fraudsters because opportunists have leveraged their logical and illogical mistrust of the government into blindly accepting a few magic beans for the little cash they do possess. Cults prey on the desperate and the desperate are more inclined to double down than admit they brought about their own ruin.

It’s another bad actor fallacy. If Hamas and the Taliban are terrorists, then all Muslims must be terrorists. But if one police officer murders an innocent civilian, well he’s just an anomaly. Sure, I’ve been burned by three crypto scams already, but I just have bad luck and keep picking the frauds. People only see a pattern if it serves their agenda. Facts are opinions and opinions are facts so long as someone is paying a politician enough to keep eroding public trust.

I must therefore give McKenzie a lot of credit for never punching down on the people most affected by this scam. It would be easy to make fun of the real people still betting against their own best interests despite getting burned, but he chooses to focus on their fallibility as human beings trying to survive a flawed system by embracing a criminal one. Because guess what? That flawed system has pretty much become criminal itself thanks to lobbyists.

At the end of the day, people are going to do what they’re going to do. Nobody knows that better than McKenzie considering his personal debrief leads to the realization that his skepticism was righter than he ever could have imagined and that all the work he’s done to unearth that fact probably won’t change a thing. All he can do is lay out the facts, make us laugh, and use his reach to at least provide an alternative narrative to people willing to listen.

Because he’s not a celebrity giving customers financial advice (illegally) on a commercial for crypto despite being paid in US dollars. He’s just a celebrity telling the public to “Be careful” with whatever they choose to do. McKenzie has no financial stake in crypto’s success or failure. He’s an entertainer who couldn’t ignore an obviously predatory scheme enriching the rich with the life savings of the poor. So, he entertains us with the rabbit hole he fell through to prove it.