Director Oliver Stone, or as he’s sometimes known, Anathema to Subtlety, isn’t shy about his left-leaning politics or his disdain for Wall Street leeches who represent a glaring inefficiency in the American economy. But you wouldn’t know it watching “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” which may serve as the best commercial yet for the sexy, fast-paced biz of buying and selling tiny imaginary bits of companies without ever having to produce anything or contribute to society in any meaningful way.
Gordon Gekko, Hollywood’s preeminent swindling banker, is back. Sent to jail in 1987 for practicing the “greed is good” mantra he preaches, Gekko finally gets out just in time to witness the global bitter fruits of decades of Wall Street greediness. In his heyday Gordon the Gekko was one of the most notorious financial fraudsters in history. The Big Apple was his playground and he was treated like its schoolmaster. Those days are no more. The aristocracy of modern New York doesn’t recognize him and even his suits seem to have lost a little of that playboy sheen. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), on the other hand, is an ambitious but naive up-and-coming trader reveling in million-dollar bonuses and untold luxuries. Since Moore just happens to be dating Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan), the two greenback addicts inevitably cross paths.
“Money Never Sleeps” marks yet another of Stone’s honorable attempts at biting, satirical prescience, but fails to deliver any kind of finishing blow. The setup is all savory goodness. The opening scene is the film’s best wherein a prison guard returns Gekko’s personal belongings to him including a silk handkerchief, a gold money clip — sans money, and a mobile phone the size of brick, which immediately dates the old swindler as a dinosaur being released into a changing environment bearing no resemblance to the one which he once ruled.
Payoff, conversely, is something the film only delivers to its glamorized criminal characters. Gekko, who corrupts Moore with his devious rationalizations and promises of the world, is a mere shell of his former quietly ferocious, Satanic diplomat — and a boring shell at that.
Josh Brolin as the Gekko stand-in is adequately seedy but never rises to the challenge of role that defined Michael Douglas’ career. And the war between his character and LaBeouf’s seems downright laughable compared to the relationship between the Gekko of the past and Charlie Sheen’s character.
And for all his railing against unchecked corporate greed and casino capitalism, Stone and his writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, seem unable or unwilling to show any real consequences for engaging in such despicable behavior. No real permanence is attached to any acts of excessive greed or poor choices, and only a fleeting attempt is made to show the terrible real-life results inflicted on the innocent thanks to a system that rewards inefficiency and irrational behavior.
