WALL STREET : MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

“WALL STREET : MONEY NEVER SLEEPS” (Shia Lebeouf, Carey Mulligan, Michael Douglas & Josh Brolin)

Somehow I don’t have as much trouble with sequels that take a decade or two to appear. I liked the first ‘Wall Street’, but didn’t have a lot of interest in this sequel only because I’m ignorant of the subject matter. I don’t care about Wall Street, I don’t own any stocks and even though I liked ‘Trading Places’, I still have no idea why Don Ameche screamed ‘turn those machines back on’ at the end of it.
The problem with long-awaited sequels is that the original isn’t fresh in your mind. So when Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox makes a one scene cameo, it didn’t really click for me because I had forgotten exactly what took place 20-some years ago in a film I only watched once.
The addition of the kid who stars in the toy robot trucks movies didn’t exactly lure me into the theatre either. We waited until it came to the $3 theatre, and, as usually is the case, it was worth the price of admission. But I was also glad I didn’t pay full price to see it a month or so earlier.
It is full of witty banter & boring presentation speeches. It has some well acted scenes & a few that made me cringe. & since I hadn’t heard any David Byrne songs for a while, the soundtrack, featuring nothing but the Ex-Talking Heads frontman’s music was acceptable to my ears.
‘Wall Street 2’ usually worked when Michael Douglas was onscreen recreating his Gordon Gekko character; or secondary, Josh Brolin’s even greedier character Bretton.
When it didn’t click was when Shia & Carey appeared. Labouf played Wall Street whiz kid, Jake, who asked his girlfriend Winnie (Mulligan) to marry him minutes after receiving some tragic news about his mentor. Winnie‘s last name being Gekko, daughter of Gordon, recently released from prison for insider trading.
The ‘love interest’ portion of the film fell flat for me because it seemed as though Mulligan has tears rolling down her cheeks in practically every scene she was in – it became monotonous; “Alright, ya big cry baby shut off the waterworks & stop whining about your past!”
So Jake loves Winnie, who hates her father. Jake introduces himself to future father-in-law Gordon & falls in love with him as well. Jake tries desperately to bring father & daughter together, but for what reason? It seems, so he can get in good with ‘dad’ so they begin working as a team in cheating other people out of their money. We’re suppose to feel good about their greed because they are going after other greedy j*ck-offs, but with too many characters not worth caring about, there’s really no point to this film Other than the lesson that money, like rust, has insomnia.
That’s not to say ‘Wall Street 2’ wasn’t entertaining – Bretton is the person that ratted Gordon out which led to Gekko’s 7 year stint in prison; so Gordon approaches Breton at a fundraiser and he tells him, “You stop telling lies about me & I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
So the easy to follow lame love story dragged the film down, while the ‘I have no idea what these people are talking about’ stock traders made it work.
I liked the fact that 111 year old Eli Wallach was in several scenes and the old guy remembered his lines & the fact that Jake’s cell phone’s ring was the ‘Theme from the Good, the Bad & The Ugly’, which made me wonder if Eli even knew was a tribute to him.
Early on Gordon tells Jake, “Money is a bitch that never sleeps.” & yet, it is abundantly apparent that Gordon loves money more than anything else – so why would he call his one true love a bitch? & why did Lou (Frank Langella) have a bag of potato chips as his last meal? Surely there was a decent donut shop nearby. Sometimes stock brokers just don’t make sense...