Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (**½)

Directed by: Oliver Stone

Starring: Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Eli Wallach, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella

Seen: September 24^th 2010

**½ Out of ****

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, starts with the release of Gordon Gekko (Douglas) from prison in the year 2001 – he is unceremoniously dumped back into society on a very limited budget, which he starts using to, among other things, write a book: Greed is Good. In his marketing of the book he hints at an looming stock market crash, but as he is mostly regarded as a has-been, he is ignored.

This sequel to the iconic 80’s movie with the even more iconic main character, Gekko, opts to  follow an arc in the life of Jake Moore (LaBeouf) during the year 2008. He is a young Wall street broker with a seemingly bright future ahead of him, and he is the main character, leaving Gekko on the sidelines for long stretches of this movie. Near the beginning of the movie Jake is given a spot bonus of just over $1.4 million by his father-figure boss, Louis Zabel (Langella), so we know the stakes are high and the money is rolling. The time-frame of the movie puts it right before and leading into the most recent global economic meltdown, and when Bretton James (Brolin) and his team of investment bankers start rumours, Keller Zabel, Louis Zabel’s and by extension Jake Moore’s firm goes under. This leads to Zabel’s suicide, and Jake takes this personally, undertaking revenge against James.

                                                                                                                                                    

Jake is in a relationship with Winnie (Mulligan), Gekko’s estranged daughter. She wants nothing to do with her father, as she knows a little of what he is, the same character we as viewers know from 23 years back. Jake wants to get closer to Gekko, who he thinks he can learn from and who also gives him some scraps of info which he uses against Bretton James, but Gekko drives a wedge between Jake and Winnie as the movie progresses.

The economic intrigue is once again there, but this time director Oliver Stone tries to weave much more reality into the story – events in this movie tie in directly to the 2008 collapse and eventual bail-out packages from the US government. Gordon Gekko is not as clear-cut as he was in the original movie, here he has good intentions one moment, and not-so-good the next. He sells the idea that time is more important than money, and in these moments you feel that the movie tries to almost preach that money isn’t everything – but then it doesn’t take too long for an emotional situation to be mediated/solved when it is revealed that the money is not lost anymore – a moralistic swing in a value system the movie tries at times to hand to the viewer.

Douglas, in his limited time on screen, brings back glimpses of the old Gekko, and he is, good guy or not, the character you most want to see during the movie. LaBeouf is good as Jake, a more innocent and morally upstanding version of the original movie’s Bud Fox (who has a delicious cameo in this movie: “Does Blue Horseshoe still love Anacot Steel?”), and his portrayal of both the betrayer and the betrayed at different stages of the movie somehow grounds the movie in humanity – an opposite of sorts to Gekko. Carey Mulligan is supposed to be a more significant character, but she is used more as a plot device to advance/damage the relationship between Moore and Gekko than a real person; she spends quite a lot of screen-time crying or being angry/stubborn (mostly with reason though). Josh Brolin is very good as the villain, but his character never really chills the way the oft-good guy, oft-bad guy Gordon Gekko does when he gets going.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is definitely not a bad movie, and many will enjoy the speculation around reasons for the 2008 economic crashes, but it somehow doesn’t really make it as either a drama (money still controls emotions and even such a powerful thing as forgiveness in a movie where the opposite is at times hinted at), or a thriller (everything ends up too pretty-sitting, too perfect, no-one really loses anything). Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps will leave those who didn’t see the original unaffected to bored (as it is, at 2:14, far too long), and those who saw it and enjoyed it slightly nonplussed as the dark edge of the first movie is not present here.