Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Gordon Gekko was originally meant to be a villain. But when he told an audience in 1987′s Wall Street that “Greed is good,” a generation of aspiring hedge fund operators took his words to heart. In this long-awaited sequel, it turns out that writer-director Oliver Stone has finally fallen for the old reprobate himself. Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, emerges from jail a changed man—his greasy locks replaced by a more granola-like mane. One person who isn’t buying the reformed act is daughter Carey Mulligan, who blames dad for her drug addict brother’s death. Her boyfriend Shia LaBoeuf, however, starts getting hints from Gekko on how to bring down the evil financier who destroyed his mentor. Does a humbled trader, though, ever really change his suspenders? There’s lots of tut-tutting over the causes and fall-out of our current financial crisis, but Stone’s film is essentially a bull-market melodrama. That means good-looking folks—Josh Brolin and Susan Sarandon are in there as well—getting emotional in big, expensive-looking rooms—no more so than when Douglas delivers a speech that has eerie parallels with the actor’s real-life relationship to his late son. Like the original film, this second trip down Wall Street is a guilty pleasure with just a little moral chastisement.
Extras: Stone provides his usual erudite commentary and there are interviews with director and cast.
- By C. Bottomley
