October 4, 2010: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
I’ve been waiting for 23 years to see this film. I saw the original in the theatre with a friend at the tender age of 13, and in retrospect I don’t know why at that age I would have been so eager to see a drama about 1980s family tensions and high finance. But I’ve held Wall Street (1987) close to my heart for all these years, and no matter how bad the sequel was rumoured to be, I was going to see it.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a maddening mix of good and bad, which makes me unable in good conscience to recommend it to anyone, while knowing at the same time that I’d be preventing people from seeing some sequences which are real gems. I’d classify this as being similar to other late-period Oliver Stone films such as World Trade Center (2006) and W. (2008), in that the characters are fairly simply drawn and the purpose of the film is more to make a point with the plot. In all of these cases, real-life events are explored, but in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, at least Stone has the benefit of previously established fictional characters who gain some greater depth by the mere fact that we’ve known them for decades. He does take advantage of that, but the result is a jarring dichotomy between the Gordon Gekko character (played by Michael Douglas to a 1987 Oscar win and reprised here as the centrepiece of the film) or even the Bud Fox encounter (Charlie Sheen returning in a marvelous cameo), as compared with the new characters, including Shia LaBeouf as a young Wall Street up-and-comer, and Carey Mulligan as Gekko’s daughter, and even Susan Sarandon in a small role as Gekko’s ex-wife. While Douglas can evoke a response in the viewer with a mere nod of his head or widening of his eyes, LaBeouf struggles in vain to make his character seem like anything other than a plot device as Stone condescendingly picks apart the 2008 global financial collapse as if he was the only one who saw it coming. Even Eli Wallach, as a possibly insane or possibly prescient business patriarch, is either miscast or underutilized, which just adds to the confusing swirl of new characters. Mind you, I have nothing against Wallach, who at age 94 is apparently still going strong, and I liked the sneaky little nod to his past, with LaBeouf’s cellphone ringtone being a clip of the iconic Ennio Morricone music from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966), in which Wallach played “The Ugly”.
When the film is going through lots of fast-paced talk about complex business maneuvers and stock trading schemes, it is snappy and engrossing. However, it bogs down in the murky and ever-changing personal relationships, because the shifts in the characters personalities don’t seem to be motivated by anything. It seemed to me that they would change just so that the writers could play out different ideas with them in those modes. For example, there are great scenes which could be written for Gekko as a reformed “good” guy, and there are great scenes which could be written for him as a man who is evil to the core. Well, guess what? We get both of those scenarios, and it’s really not clear which one he actually is or why he would shift. Even the ending is arbitrary and confusing.
I’ve never thought that the original film was particularly well known or liked, so I was surprised to see a sequel come to light, and the confused nature of this screenplay is a good indicator that nobody quite knew how to handle it. On one hand, lazy plot devices like pregnancy and lying to a fiancée to spark a breakup are abundant. On the other hand, though, Douglas takes slimy to another level here with Gekko acting genuine and gaining people’s trust until he’s back on top and money dictates his actions once again. There are some great scenes here, but they are buried under a lot of other crap.
Disappointing sequel, not without its merits.
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