5/10
In 1987, Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas hit paydirt with Wall Street. 23 years later, with all matters financial being in the headlines as never before, you might think that this was a good time for Stone to be revisiting this territory. Unfortunately, his directing skills, never subtle in the first place, have not improved in the intervening decades, while his radicalism has softened if not atrophied. The result is more melodrama than expose.
The once almighty and wicked Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) has done 8 years of porridge (improbable - financial crooks usually get about 10 minutes), bit no one comes to collect him when he's released. Jump forward to 2008, and we meet young Jake (Shia Laboef), an eager broker with his mind set on green energy and a lovely girlfriend, Winnie (played by Carey Mulligan), who just happens to be Gekko's estranged daughter. Jake's boss gets caught up in the early stages of the financial meltdown, thanks to the double-dealing of a slimy dealer (Josh Brolin, looking uncannily like a younger Oliver Stone), and tragedy ensues. So now we have a whole bunch of plot. Jake is trying to raise money for his green energy project, trying to get his girlfriend and her dad to kiss and make friends, trying to get revenge for his mentor's demise, and - for no good reason - trying to help out his mum, Susan Sarandon, who's an estate agent short of the a few hundred thou.
This is the film's first major failing - too many plot strands which all have a somewhat predictable and been there/seen that feel to them. A bit less story and fewer cliches would have been welcome. Next prob: Ollie's getting on a bit, and hasn't had a hit in millennia. His hot streak was in the mid/late 80s, and you get the feeling that he's back at the Wall Street trough because there's nothing much else going on. Because ironically, he doesn't have a lot of interest to say about the most important news story of the last hundred years. There is none of the righteous anger or clarity of Michael Moore, just a lot of shots of gleaming skyscrapers, and rich people wining and dining. Gekko has become the good guy (well, goodish), Jake/Shia is a sweet innocent who's too good to be true, and the villain does everything except curl his moustache and stroke the cat in his lap.
And it all goes on too long. The film did not need to be two hours plus, did not need to have so much complex narrative, and should have cast a more withering and explicit look at the way that greedy banks and bankers ruined capitalism while still staying rich. On the plus side, Douglas does pretty well with a limited role (he's not really the star anymore), and it's always a blessing to have Carey Mulligan in a film, though she too has not enough to do. Apart from that, it's not exactly a bad film, just an unnecessary one.
