The 23 years between the original Wall Street and this sequel make GT's schedule look like a soap opera production line, but that long wait was just excellent timing. The first film was an operatic exposure of '80s excess; now, Stone has returned to sniff around the post-bubble ruins.
Michael Douglas is back as Gordon Gekko, the former messiah of self-interest, now apparently reformed by a lengthy stint in jail for insider trading and working the lecture circuit with a nice line in denouncements of the financial sector. "Someone reminded me I once said 'greed is good," he proclaims from his podium, "now it seems legal. Because everyone is drinking the same Kool-Aid." What does he mean? Was greed illegal in the first film?
Shia LaBeouf takes the role of the innocent trader, whose relationship with Gekko's journalist daughter (an almightily underused Carey Mulligan) brings him under the ex-corporate raider's influence.
Unlike his '87 counterpart Charlie Sheen, LaBeouf never has an interesting moral dilemma: he breaks the law. He gets drawn into Gekko's machinations, but his motivation is always aggravatingly pure – to the point that it seems fine for him to bully his realtor mother (Susan Sarandon, also almightily underused) back into a nursing career.
He's a trader. Why does he get to take the moral high ground over an insufficient nurturing mom in a film about Wall Street's rapacious incompetence?
Because money never sleeps is in love with its subject. Not in the intoxicated-with-machismo way that the first film was, but in a sappy, sloppy old man way: it's out to rehabilitate Gekko and to show the financial sector as a benign industry corrupted by arrivistes, rather than a systemically flawed thing. And, in the end, this is what makes it dull. Who wants a decent Gordon when we're in the midst of a monster renaissance?