Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

After eight years behind bars, notorious Wall Street stockbroker Gordon Gekko (Douglas) steps back into the outside world to find his family have abandoned him. As the global banking system teeters on the brink of disaster, Gekko looks to remodel himself as a prophet of financial apocalypse. Looking to restore a relationship with his estranged daughter Winnie (Mulligan), Gekko sets out on a mission to warn people of the impending crisis as well as helping Winnie's young broker fiancee Jake (Shia LeBeouf) in his quest to figure out who was responsible for the death of his former mentor. Despite his newly discovered conscience, Winnie can never be sure of Gekko's true intentions. Will he put aside his old philosophies of greed and personal gain or will old habits die hard?

Emerging more than twenty years after the original, Wall Street 2 is a timely critique of the causes of our current economic malaise. Having said that, Oliver Stone seems to have softened in his old age. While the Gordon Gekko of 1987 was the embodiment of the serpentine nature of financial trading, and Wall Street was infused with a feeling of righteous anger, the overwhelming sense generated by its sequel is one of atonement for past sins.

Gekko is here more grandfatherly than genuinely malevolent. Michael Douglas injects a welcome dose of paternalism into his an excellent performance. While Shia LeBeouf is something of an acquired taste, his labradoresque enthusiasm for the chase here works, and Carey Mulligan builds on her burgeoning reputation with her sensitive turn as Gekko's daughter. While many despair at Stone's increased amenability to the world around him, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps emphasises most explicitly his ability to tell a good story and bring to life intriguing characters.

Gregory Frame