Went to the symphony tonight, which was pretty good but needed something more modern to entertain myself. Went by CVS for some ice cream and then got this from the red box outside. As the global economy teeters on the brink of disaster, a young Wall Street trader partners with disgraced former Wall Street corporate raider Gordon Gekko on a two-tiered mission: To alert the financial community to the coming doom, and to find out who was responsible for the death of the young trader's mentor.
38/50 Eggs
In the original Wall Street (1987) director Oliver Stone presented a dire warning for Wall Street brokers everywhere. It came at a time when the financial bubble was close to bursting, and a healthy dose of Oliver Stone's traditionally moral spinning plots seemed both relevant and necessary. While practically all sequels are relevant, very few can claim to be necessary, and it's in the majority that Money Never Sleeps unfortunately falls.
On paper it's a thriller as cold as cash and as calculating as the most experienced of any of Wall Street's real brokers, with Michael Douglas's Gekko as good as it gets to the definitive anti-hero of the financial age. Gekko is just as complicated and compelling as when we left him, all the way back in 1987.
It's a shame then that his vehicle this time round is a slow and derivative script with believability issues uncharacteristic of the usually well-researched Stone. In revisiting Wall Street, Stone seemingly attempts the impossible task of fully comprehending it. It leaves us with a baggy, unbalanced yet ambitious film that spikes at some occasional highs, and bottoms out at some bankrupt lows.
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