There have been few films in recent memory that coax the allegiance of their viewers onto the side of the villain, but Oliver Stone's "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps," the sequel to his 1987 hit "Wall Street," does just that.
For those who are unfamiliar with the 1987 original, it chronicles the rise of stock trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) as he struggles with the moral (and legal) implications of lucrative insider trading. Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gekko, a ruthless and shamelessly greedy power player on Wall Street.
The first film ends with Fox's indictment of Gekko, and "Wall Street 2" rejoins us ten years later, just as Gekko, reformed or not, is released from federal prison.
Among the personal belongings that he reclaims are a gold Rolex and a 1980s brick of a cell phone.
In this film, unlike in the last, Gekko is entwined in a complicated personal matter involving his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) and her fiancé, young and ambitious Wall Street trader Jake (Shia Lebouf).
Though the first "Wall Street" also pitted the financial world against the familial to an extent, this film finds the two spheres more balanced (in screen time if not in effectiveness).
Winnie is afraid that the financial world that she watched corrupt her father will do the same to Jake, though we see that Jake, a skilled trader on the elevator up, still has his conscience.
We deduce this from his passionate-to-the-point-of-being-annoying desire to invest in an alternative energy company.
When the markets crash à la 2008, Jake's firm goes under and he becomes a trader with Bretton James (Josh Brolin), a man who serves as an emblem of all the morally-questionable money grubbers at the top of the game, and the one who caused the downfall of Jake's old firm.
Hence, the motivation behind Jake's move is partly monetary and partly revenge: he wants to destroy Bretton James.
Re-enter Gordon Gekko who, since his release, has reinvented himself as the author of a new novel and spends his time lecturing to graduate students.
He has fallen off the financial map, and all he wants is reconciliation with his daughter and, of course, money.
Gekko, Jake, Winnie and Bretton fall into an elaborate mess of trades, tips, dinner parties and breakups, each character trying to achieve their own ends and get out without sullying their self-perceptions.
Overall, Stone handles this elaborate mess fairly well.
It is clear that he has bitten off more than he can chew with this particular financial topic; explaining the 2008 crisis, its moral implications and all of the different types of characters involved is a mouthful.
As a result, the action that takes place off of Wall Street is less than satisfying.
Mulligan is unconvincing as the morally- and socially-conscious fragile love interest, and the relationship between Winnie and Jake is mundane at best.
Douglas adds interest, but even he is more effective in the office than outside of its walls.
But despite the enormous task of handling a complicated topic, the film avoids being dry by adding some nice touches.
Eli Wallach (the "ugly" from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") shines as an ancient and powerful Wall Street trader.
Jake's ringtone, by chance, is the theme song from the same film.Also notable and charming is the use of the same actress (Sylvia Miles, elderly even in 1987) as the realtor in both films.
When it comes down to it, both Wall Street films are as much about flashing excess as denouncing it, and no character embodies this as well as Gordon Gekko.
The best scene of the film is the one in which Gekko transforms from the lecturing author that he has become back into the conniving, merciless and mordantly comical Gekko from '87.
Gekko, like Wall Street itself, is both attractive for his success and abhorrent for his blindness to everything else.
In many ways, "Wall Street 2" is the same way.
As a director, Stone deals with the financial side of the story masterfully as he did with the first film, but the interpersonal and emotional side of the story gets short shrift.
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