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“Inside Job,” the acclaimed new documentary by director Charles Ferguson, is a movie that tries to do for the economic crisis what Ferguson’s last film, “No End in Sight,” did for the Iraq War. In many ways, it succeeds.

Once again, Ferguson stands back, and also leans in close, to give you the big picture – in this case, how the unchecked growth of investment banking, the mania for deregulation, and the new-fangled application of principles of physics to the stock market all merged to create a high-finance runaway train that was destined to crash.

Ferguson does a ruthless job of revealing one aspect of the crisis that few have talked about: the selling out of prestigious economists who work in academia. Some of the most respected economic thinkers in the country made, and still make, huge amounts of money from consulting fees, and they were instrumental in lending credibility to corrupt policies.

When Ferguson confronts these men on camera and gets them to glower and squirm, you taste the cold vengeance of deceptions laid bare.

And yet, as well-made as “Inside Job” is, the vast majority of the film is nothing you haven’t encountered dozens of times before on cable news or in the columns of Paul Krugman. Ferguson gathers it all together, but he doesn’t really present much that’s new.

And frankly, the film’s upshot, which is that President Barack Obama made a drastic mistake by hiring insiders like Timothy Geithner to oversee the disaster they originally enabled, strikes me as far too easy.

It’s implicit in Ferguson’s argument that if Obama had tried for a more radical overhaul, the economy would now be in better shape. But that’s all too convenient for a hindsight documentary to say.

You could just as readily make the case that if Obama hadn’t gone with insiders, the economy might be every bit as depressed as it is now. And in that case, the charge that he’s the new, socialist Jimmy Carter would probably stick all the more.