Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

I saw Wall Street recently and whilst it was good it was something that was screaming 1980’s. Fast forward 23 years and the morals of Wall Street (the real Wall Street) are just as important as they were back in 1987. With the economical meltdown around the world, it seemed like this probably wasn’t going to have the same punch that Wall Street 1 had. At the beginning of the film Gekko is released from prison and a limo comes out and he thinks its his but its for someone else.

Carey Mulligan and Shia LaBeouf (the charisma vacuum) are a couple. Mulligan plays Winnie Gekko who has an estranged relationship with Gordon.  I found her performance to be very good and she does her best when acting againt LaBeouf. Shia LeBeouf is an actor that I really find annoying. In pretty much everything I’ve seen him in, all I can think is ‘how did he become the star he is when all he does it suck the charisma and energy out of the room?’. I didn’t see that changing in this movie.  His inability as an actor really shows when he has a scene with Michael Douglas because compared to Douglas, LaBeouf looks like he should be in an amateur production of something.

Susan Sarandon makes a surprise appearance and she is really unhinged in this movie. She makes a few appearances and they were great because they added some much needed energy into a film that was otherwise lacking the sort of stuff you would want from this sort of film. Josh Brolin is very good here. He’s utterly unlikeable  as Bretton James and everytime he’s on screen you get a reaction which is that you hope he gets his comeuppance. After appearing in the first few moments of the film, its nearly half an hour before Michael Douglas preoperly appears in the film. Everytime that Michael Douglas is on screen I find myself interested in what’s going on because he is the one that gets all the great speeches and the film comes alive when he is about. When he’s off screen I kind of lose interest. Frank Lagella is a great piece of casting as Louis Zabel. Everytime he was on screen I was enjoying the film. He’s an actor that does wel in whatever he’s in. His death was a surprise and a shame really.

Despite looking a lot better than the 1987 original, Wall Street doesn’t feel like it should. It feels like we’re being lectured at and nothing really get addressed that we don’t already know or have seen in reality. Douglas seems to be shielded for a large amount of this movie and its probably the reason why I don’t rate this as highly as the original.