Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Directed by Oliver Stone

(R)

***

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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is “that rare sequel that took its time,” said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. The high-finance morality tale Wall Street arrived in 1987, on the heels of the Black Monday stock market crash. Now, 23 years later, director Oliver Stone updates his story in reaction to 2008’s financial crisis. With “style, wry humor, and a healthy dose of cautionary polemic,” he somehow turns those painful days into something that’s “great fun to watch,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. Michael Douglas makes a “triumphant return” as Gordon Gekko, the shady financier who has apparently reformed. He and a young protégé (Shia LaBeouf) get drawn into complicated machinations involving big banks and government bailouts. But as the film follows the protégé’s relationship with Gekko’s estranged daughter, its “urgency evaporates,” said Keith Phipps in the A.V. Club. We often seem to be watching two different films, neither of which explores Gekko’s interesting moral evolution. Instead of providing insight into modern greed, Stone’s film is merely “a reminder that we all got, and remain, screwed.”