By William Wolf

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS  Send This Review to a Friend

Sequels are generally a bad idea, but director Oliver Stone beats the odds with his vibrant, glitzy follow-up to his earlier look at greed and financial machinations that sent protagonist Gordon Gekko to prison. Michael Douglas, whom we meet when he is being released after his stretch behind bars, returns with a hot-blooded performance as Gekko. who tries to recapture power in a new, updated money-hungry environment. Douglas is again memorable with a performance that may be even better than the one before.

True, the new story-line has its predictability, but the smart screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff bristles with clever dialogue and offers emotional focus on both Gekko’s effort to renew a relationship with the daughter who despises him and her boyfriend who looks to Gekko as a mentor and secretly schemes to bring father and daughter together. There are also old business scores to settle.

All of this is wrapped in a high-tech, contemporary atmosphere with such filmmaking possibilities increased since the original and enhanced by a plot attuned to the sort of updated shenanigans that produced the most recent crisis.

Shia LaBeouf provides intense energy as Jake Moore, a potential Gekko in the making who idolizes Frank Langella as old-line investment wizard Louis Zabel. Langella contributes a touching performance as Zabel’s world comes crashing down with disastrous results fueled by the manipulations of Josh Brolin as the grasping, conniving Bretton James. Jake hungers for payback. But he also believes in using finance for the good of the environment and has been nursing a scientific development favored by his girlfriend Winnie Gekko, played by the ever-fetching, distinctive looking Carey Mulligan.

The film never stops being riveting, and director Stone succeeds in bringing all the elements together excitingly—the personal stories, the overall, music-accented, jangling look at the investment world, the vendettas, the crassness of new players, the back-stabbing and the recklessness that can lead to illegalities ripe for exposure. And with a flawed character like Gekko, there are the seeds of willingness to betray trust in order to get back on top.

Stone is adept at providing enjoyable details. I especially liked. veteran actor Eli Wallach as one of the old-timers, who gives the bird with whistling and dismissive hand gestures to one who deserves to lose in a moment of turning the tables. Wallach still has the knack of being an important screen presence even in a small role, as he demonstrated recently in “The Ghost Writer.”

“Wall Street: The Money Never Sleeps” scores as one of the impressive films of 2010. A 20h Century Fox release.

  

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