Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is out of prison and, having reformed his way, is trying to reconnect with is daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan). She is romantically engaged to Jacob Moore (Shia Labeouf) an idealistic broker who gets in the way of the new bad guy Bretton James (Josh Brolin).
I can understand what drove Oliver Stone back. Wall Street is extremely topical and he needs to do something commercially viable every now and then so that he can keep doing the crazy stuff, like interviewing Fidel Castro which is the American equivalent of the devil I’m told.
Not the less this is not a very good screenplay, certainly inferior to those hand penned by Stone himself. I only have a very vague recollection of the first movie, 24 years is a lot of time, so I’m not making any comparison to that. Actually I think I enjoyed “good” Gordon Gekko more than the people who idolatrized his “Greed is good” speech.
The beginning is even interesting with a lot of plot and intrigue going on but after a while we get to two big problems.
The first one is that Jacob Moore is an idiot, a complete hopeless idiot. I understand that Hollywood need an Hollywood hero type at the center of all his movies but when we set it in something resembling real life really it doesn’t work. I can’t cheer somebody who starts uttering menacing threats to his boss; I only want to slap him. And I don’t really want to delve into all the lying and the illogical contrivances that exist only to advance the plot.
By the way I wonder why very single Shia LaBeouf character is a moron. Is he the go to guy when there is an idiot in a screenplay?
Anyway back to the movie. The second big problem is a contrived and stupid ending. I understand that “financial crisis” is not an easy enemy for an Hollywood movie but their solution to unravel it is both unrealistic and singularly depressing at the same time.
I don’t want to say that this movie is terrible. There is a lot of good craftsmanship here, mainly from Oliver Stone who is still one of the greatest ever. Add a couple of interesting ideas and a fine performance from Douglas and the end result is not that bad, just don’t go out of your way to see it.
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