Sequel City — Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Published by Pop Bunker, September 30, 2010
In a first for Sequel City—which is no great feat, seeing as this is only the fourth column—I will be presenting a movie that just came out in theaters. Cue fan fare!
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has some impressive sequel hurdles to clear before it can gallop past “respectable.” One, the original came out in 1987, and 23 years is generally considered wayyy too long to go between movies. Also, it’s a drama, and it’s much tougher to make good drama sequels than action or comedy. And third, sequels depend on bringing back the characters we enjoyed from the original.
Well, the two people this film absolutely needs to have—Oliver Stone as the director and Michael Douglas as the iconic Gordon Gecko—are present. I think this takes care of the first objection: Douglas is older, but so is his character. As long as he delivers Gordon Gecko circa 2008 correctly, we’re good there.
As for whether or not this is a rare good drama sequel, I would argue that it is. (I don’t like to reveal spoilers as a rule, but I’ll usually detail the plot up to at least halfway in. Because this is still in its first week of release, though, I will only reveal the first fifteen minutes and talk about the rest in vagaries. If you don’t even want that much spoiled for you, skip ahead until you see the sentence “I like to eat library books with Heinz 57 sauce and cucumbers.”)
Michael Douglas reprises the role of Gordon Gekko, which won Douglas 1987 Best Actor Academy Award. Gekko, noted Wall Street shark, went to prison as a result of the financial naughtiness of the last film—he was inside for eight years, and when he was released, no one came to pick him up. That was in 2001. Now it’s 2008, and he’s written a successful book on his favorite subject from the first film: greed.
The scene shifts to Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan, two kids living in sin in a very nice New York loft. He’s a trader with a banking firm and has eyes on a project that’s creating energy from salt water. She’s a blogger (and owner?) of a left-leaning website…and happens to be Gekko’s estranged daughter.
Events smush these people together, as they are wont to do. LaBeouf wants to get the energy thing working, but the firm he’s at gets entangled in the financial meltdown of 2008. Despite this, he wants to marry Mulligan. She’s cool with that, but she wants nothing to do with Douglas, who wants to reconnect with his only daughter.
I like to eat library books with Heinz 57 sauce and cucumbers.
I admit I haven’t seen the last few Oliver Stone movies, but they seem to fall into certain patterns for me. He is best at delivering points in history in the medium of cinema. With Stone, you get what a firefight felt like in Vietnam, or what it was like to follow Jim Morrison around, or what behind the scenes of Wall Street was like in the mid-‘80s. Stone is great at setting, but he is not as great at dialogue, or plot, or character development. Most of the stories in his movies are morality plays, taking the broad strokes of Shakespearean tragedy without the poetic language. It always seems to me that he casts great actors, like Douglas, or Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, and then has them speak clichéd, often corny lines.
This movie is no different. I won’t go any deeper into the plot, but I found that it went all quite well for a while…and then took a sharp left into dumb. It’s so obvious and hacky that you will see it coming, but if you’re like me, you’ll be silently begging the movie not to do it. It will anyway.
But as usual, because Stone can do setting, he pulls it off. So what if the plot isn’t believable even for Movie World? So what if Stone likes to fiddle with historical facts for his own ends (W., Nixon, JFK)? So what if it is almost a PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY that Mickie and Malory could have successfully engineered a prison escape on live television in Natural Born Killers? Those films were an experience.
Above all else, Stone delivered a slice of very recent history with the original Wall Street: the insider trading scandals of the mid ‘80s. That movie came out in December 1987, very soon after Wall Street people were being indicted. And this is Stone’s greatest triumph with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps—he gives us a vivid, easy to follow representation of the financial meltdown of the summer of 2008. Unlike the events of the original movie—I was 10 at the time—I was watching the news in the summer of ’08, and I have to say that this movie helped me understand it all much more than watching CNN every night.
Also, Michael Douglas is back. This cannot be undervalued—he is what most people remember from the original, not Charlie Sheen, and he will be what most remember from this one, not Shia LaBeouf. A lot of people like to rag on The Beef for his appearances in the Transformers movies and being Indiana Jones’s kid, but I think he did a fine job in this movie. (Finer than Sheen did back in the original, in fact—a little more believable as a slick Wall Street trader, little more range, etc). Carey Mulligan (An Education) is very good as Douglas’ daughter and LaBeouf’s fiancé. If that seems like a sexist way to describe her, then I’ve done my job in presenting her—the filmmakers basically wrote her as a modern-day Ophelia. That’s not to say that it’s Mulligan’s fault that her character does little besides react to what the men in her life are up to.
Other actors are good as well—Josh Brolin as the new “bad guy” and Frank Langella as LaBeouf’s mentor stand out—but the star of the show is clearly Douglas. And as he did with the original, Douglas fights through the sometimes hacky dialogue and suspicious plots to shine. He is everything he was in the original—charismatic, shady, fun to watch—and now has the complication and sadness that his crimes and time in prison have brought to him. I don’t know if it’s another Academy Award-winning performance, but it is still a great one.
I’m purposely leaving off my usual collection of Entertaining Scenes for this one to further avoid spoilers. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is not an embarrassment, nor does it suffer for having come out a quarter-century after its original. It has flaws, but these are overshadowed by its admirable qualities. I recommend seeing it.
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