With his slick hair and gigantic cell phone, the Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s original “Wall Street” was the villain who made it OK to think Greed is Good.
Out of the slammer and plopped back into New York just a few months before the financial meltdown of 2008, the Gordon Gekko of Stone’s sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” appears as a reformed man, warning his former colleagues of the impending doom.
As played again by Michael Douglas, Gekko is the same enigmatic figure we remember from the original film. Unfortunately, “Money Never Sleeps” is only a third of a Gordon Gekko movie.
Stone stuffs the movie with multiple storylines– most of them surrounding Shia LaBeouf as an ambitious trader who is lured into Gekko’s world. He’s juggling several complicated relationships: His journalist girlfriend (Carey Mulligan) is also Gekko’s estranged daughter, a ruthless competitor (Josh Brolin) is out to crush him, and his mother (Susan Sarandon) constantly needs money to salvage her fledgling Real Estate business. It takes a good hour and a half for Stone to even begin connecting the strands.
The new “Wall Street,” despite its impeccable timing, doesn’t come together as the penetrating drama Stone wants it to be. In the first half, wise old Gordon does a whole lot of talking about the financial apocalypse. Tell us something we don’t know, Gekko! There’s no dramatic stakes in these early scenes, and his arc in the second half is a forced attempt to fill in the shadier parts of his persona.
The rest of the movie belongs to LaBeouf in what is his most nuanced performance to date. He holds the overreaching plot together and plays well against the movie’s acting powerhouses (including the great Frank Langella in a key supporting role). The problem? The character just isn’t as interesting as Gekko. I’m sure Charlie Sheen felt the same way.
Oliver Stone has a tendency to go bonkers with his movies’ political statements, sometimes even with great success. But “Money Never Sleeps” doesn’t really offer anything controversial or revelatory. Perhaps he should have defended Wall Street traders. That might have been shocking.
Instead, he packs the film with some odd stylistic choices– silly flashbacks, cartoony editing transitions, numbers and charts juxtaposed over iconic landmarks, and most annoyingly, lazy visual metaphors (bubbles, bubbles everywhere!). It’s almost as if Stone got bored with his own plot.
At least Douglas delivers a few potent Gekko lines– enough to make “Money Never Sleeps” a relatively harmless follow-up to the 1987 original. But with everything going on in the world right now, it should have been so much more.
Grade: C+