Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

What an odd, stuck-together sort of movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps turned out to be; it's equal parts thriller and redemption story and not really satisfying as either. Attempting the not entirely necessary feat of putting the iconic Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in the middle of our current financial crisis, Oliver Stone gets trapped by the need to have Gekko be the bastard we love and give the audience someone to root for at the same time. How do you make a Wall Street financier a palpable movie hero in this economy? You make him driven by an obsession with green energy, just like Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf). Jake is a rising star under the tutelage of Street legend/substitute father Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) when a rash of rumors drives his brokerage firm out of business and Zabel to suicide. Jake approaches Gekko in an attempt to discover who ruined Zabel and because he's engaged to Gekko's daughter Winnie (tart Carey Mulligan). Gekko is used as a sort of guru figure, explaining the systemic problems that got us here, while Jake gets caught up in a plot involving leveraged debt, Chinese financiers, and a rival (Josh Brolin) who also has his own history with Gekko.

But Gekko has to have something to do, and in the second half of the movie we're asked to buy a massive switcheroo that puts Gekko on the A-list and Jake and Winnie's engagement in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the resolution of the Wall Street plot gets run over by the financial crisis of 2008 and the movie's need to have everyone heal. The government's decision to massively bail out banks, which will one day be the climax of a better movie about the crisis, is a sideshow to Jake, Winnie, and Gekko bopping around Europe. Douglas has some flashes of 1980's fire, but Stone needed to make the character more active. Stone's thesis is that quick fixes are all we'll get until the system changes, but the point is lost amid family dramas and a over-reliance on animation and blunt imagery (bubbles, CNBC screenshots). Wall Street c. 2010 wants to be a movie about what happened when we weren't paying attention, if only it were a little louder.