Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Director: Oliver Stone                                  Writers: Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff
Film Score: Craig Armstrong                        Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto
Starring: Michael Douglas, Carey Mulligan, Shia LeBeouf and Frank Langella

It was a great idea to bring back Gordon Gekko. Unfortunately, the screenplay didn’t quite pull off what fans had hoped for and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps winds up being a pale imitation of a sequel. It’s a little painful watching Michael Douglas as an old man. His character, even when he gets his power back at the end of the film, still looks fragile. The idea of the film seems interesting at first, but quickly devolves in the same type of story as the original Wall Street, with the eager apprentice being schooled by the master, “Gekko the Great.” In some ways it seems that Oliver Stone waited just a bit too long to come back to the character and the whole film seems like it suffers from a massive case of jet lag.

The film begins in 2001 with Douglas being released from prison. Oddly, he walks out expecting someone to be waiting for him. Uh . . . who would that be? This is just one of the many miscues in the film. Fast forward to 2008, just before the crash. Douglas has written a new book and is out on tour. In the audience is Shia LeBeouf, who just happens to be dating Douglas’s daughter—his son Rudy, from the original film, has apparently died of a drug overdose. LeBeouf is also a stockbroker, his company helping to finance a new green energy project in California. His mentor is Frank Langella, whose bank is the first one to go under, just as fellow banker Josh Brolin engineered it. LeBeouf pulls the same scam on Brolin that Charlie Sheen pulled on Douglas in the first film as a payback. But Brolin, impressed, offers to hire LeBeouf and he accepts.

And that’s just the beginning. It’s a complex story that doesn’t really seem to gel into a plot. Douglas has left his daughter, Carey Mulligan, with a trust fund worth a hundred million. In the guise of attempting to repair his relationship with his daughter he manipulates LeBeouf in the same way he manipulated Sheen in order to get his hands on the money. Speaking of which, one of the most enjoyable parts of the story is when Douglass is at a party and Charlie Sheen shows up with a woman on each arm--more like the actor himself than Bud Fox, but still a satisfying cameo. Douglas winds up driving a wedge between LeBeouf and Mulligan but, in another of those miscues, LeBeouf shows up in England to offer Douglas a “deal” to make everything right, but it isn’t really a deal at all.

Frank Langella, though he’s not in the second half of the film, gives a powerful performance that makes one wish he had been a bigger star. He dominates the screen whether he’s alone or at a table with a roomful of men. Douglas, again, looks frail and in many ways he’s difficult to watch. Brolin gives a nice performance, but I think is more effective in rural roles like No Country for Old Men. The rest of the cast, however, is pretty forgettable. There are some interesting plot twists and so it’s not completely devoid of entertainment, but not enough to recommend it. Ultimately Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps winds up being nothing more than a convoluted version of the original.