OK - so this film is the sequel to Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street - but rather than calling it Wall Street 2 (or Wall Streetest?) Stone gave it a long title that basically means nothing. I never considered money to be able to sleep, so that now I find out it never sleeps I'm sorta like, "No duh, dude". Oh - and this movie is set during the 2008 Wall Street collapse, because, you know, there were greedy people then who made a lot of money on things failing and stuff. Ugh.
This is a pretty complicated story, so bear with me. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) works as a trader in an investment house that is basically Lehman Brothers. His father-figure and mentor is and old guy named Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) who also has a seat on the New York Fed Board (or something). His company is going down the tubes because of toxic assets and the Board is trying to help him sell it. Ultimately he jumps in front of a subway train and dies. Jake, a bit lost and sad because his girlfriend, Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan - yay two Carey Mulligan movies in a row!), is out of town working on her blog.
Jake meets Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas again) when he's on a book tour and gets to talking to him. It seems Winnie doesn't like her dad because he's an asshole and was locked up in jail when she was growing up. Gekko wants to get back with his daughter, so he makes a deal with Jake that he will help Jake take down Bretton James (Josh Brolin), a guy Gekko says led Zabel to kill himself (and also a guy Gekko himself had dealings with in the Bud Fox days). There are a bunch of crosses and double crosses and proposals and bankruptcies and pregnancies and nothing all that incredibly exciting.
This is really one of the worst scripts for a movie I can remember in a long time. Every line sounds like a canned cliche ready-made for a fortune cookie - not that that was not the case with the first Wall Street movie ("who am I?," Bud Fox asks looking off his midtown balcony).
The acting here is also pretty terrible, from LaBeouf, Douglas, Mulligan, Brolin, Langella - everyone. Because Stone is such an egomaniac, he has himself in two small cameo moments as well as Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. (Was that a deal to get good press from VF? Ridiculous.) In the most surprising performance, Susan Sarandon, as Jake's mom who is under water on three houses on Long Island (Get it?! Oh, I get it!) is terrible and ridiculous beyond words here. She has a silly New Yawk accent and looks jittery and unhinged. Very sad.
Somehow Stone thought that we would forget what city the movie was set in, as every single scene begins with helicopter overhead shots of Manhattan (in the day, at night, downtown, uptown, midtown). It's really dumb and amateurish.
The only mildly good element in the film is that most of the music is from David Byrne's last album "Everything that Happens will Happen Today". It's weird to credit a director for using music from a two-year-old album, but it is good stuff and sounds better than the dialogue, so I guess we should be grateful.
Other than the use of old music, there is nothing good here. It's a sequel that is so dumb it ruins whatever good memories I have from the original (which was, honestly, not all that brilliant either). It would be like making a sequel to Citizen Kane if Rupert Murdoch were to die. I'm not interested in how you can oversimplify financial info, Oliver. Just tell a good story. I don't care that you think you once created this Harry Lime-like super-villain; Gordon Gekko is at best two-dimensional and not very interesting (if anything, Bud Fox was the interesting character in the first film, not Gekko). This is basically just big-scale public masturbation by Stone and not worth ever watching.
Stars: .5 of 4
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