"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" Nearly Crashes

Official Movie Poster Courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

            Usually when you watch a movie, you expect it to be dumbed down so that the average audience will understand, or at least have the ability to understand. Not so with “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” a movie which covers an insider trading scandal, a market crash, a bailout, a love story, and of course a ton of greed in the middle. It shows the infamous Michael Douglas back as Gordon Gekko, a role that won him an Oscar in 1987 when the original “Wall Street” came out. Douglas nailed his role as the most greedy slime ball of a man imaginable, and  yet I love it. Douglas was perhaps the best part of the movie because the rest of the film was confusing and overly didactic.

            Gekko gets out of prison after serving eight years for what he considers “a victimless crime,” but what most of us would call insider trading. He meets Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a new up-and-coming trader who is planning to marry his estranged daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Jacob was feeling vengeful toward the man (Josh Brolin) who started rumors against and crashed the company Jacob supported, causing his mentor (Frank Langella) to kill himself and so he bonds with his future father-in-law and learns his ways. Winnie warns Jacob that her dad will hurt them, but he thinks Gekko is a changed man. True to character, Gekko betrays his own family to get back in the game. The movie ends with him trying to reconcile after his many betrayals.

Gekko (Douglas, pictured left) and Jacob (Labeouf, pictured right) decide to have a relationship behind Winnie's back.

            Douglas is the real focus of this movie because his performance was so outstanding. Sure, LaBeouf, Mulligan, and Brolin were good supporters, but they were so overshadowed that they are barely worth mentioning. Douglas is the villain you love to hate and the perfect Wall Street tycoon that exemplifies greed and manipulation. He plays the father who wants to reconcile with his daughter just as well as he plays the greedy backstabbing jerk that steals from his own family. He won an Oscar for this role years ago and he is still just as good at it.  

            The downside is that Douglas was just a platform for Director Oliver Stone’s preachy thoughts about Wall Street. Stone’s father worked on Wall Street, and so he displays a lot of his feelings toward the greedy people of Wall Street through speeches and conversations.

When Jacob was talking to Brolin’s character he asked, “What’s your number? Everyone has a number that they feel is enough and when they get that much money, they will be satisfied. What’s yours?”

 Brolin replies, “More.”

Another time, Gekko says, “It’s not about the money, it’s about the game.”

Stone was overly didactic and really made it obvious that he was trying to portray the people of Wall Street as greedy, power-hungry slime balls. There was a little bit too much of Stone’s own feelings in the movie.

            On top of all that, the first half was way too difficult to understand for the common man. They used a lot of financial lingo that isolated most of the audience from understanding what was going on. It was not until it picked up with more character motivated plot lines in the second half that the movie was even slightly watchable. As a director, Stone should have made it clear what was happening so that you did not have to be a finance guru to comprehend what was going on.

            The original “Wall Street” was such an amazing film and the sequel that appeared  23 years later just did not live up to it. Michael Douglas continued to keep the infamous Gordon Gekko alive and better than ever, but Stone was unable to create an interesting successor with a boring, confusing plot line and his preachy speeches. The point of this movie seemed to be to get out feelings about greed and power instead of make a clear cut, enjoyable film. It was not terrible, but it was just too perplexing for me to know the difference.

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