"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’’ finds Oliver Stone in an ebullient, I-told-you-so mood. Set just before and after the 2008 financial meltdown, the new movie is an enjoyably frisky mess, with the camera dashing into boardrooms and bedrooms, and characters coming at each other from all sides. The film’s lack of focus is almost criminal, but schadenfreude energizes Stone. Everyone here is dancing on a bubble, and no one has the guts to admit the bubble is about to pop.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Michael Douglas is in top form as he reprises the slippery Gordon Gekko
Does the director really have to illustrate that with a scene of schoolchildren blowing actual bubbles into the Central Park sky? Of course he does; otherwise he wouldn’t be Oliver Stone. After a decade-plus of contentiously received documentaries (“Comandante’’), box office bombs (“Alexander’’), and retread Stone-isms (“W.’’), the sequel to 1987’s “Wall Street’’ lets the director tap into the filmmaking brio, if not the social indignation, of his younger self.
The most telling difference this time is that Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko is no longer a villain as slimy as his namesake but a grand old alter ego — the devil at twilight. “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’’ is supposedly the story of one Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), an ambitious young trader who sets out to avenge his mentor (Frank Langella) and ends up playing the big boys for his soul. Whatever; Douglas steals every scene he’s in.
Released from prison early in the film — no one’s there to greet him; the waiting limo is for a gangbanger — Gekko haunts the edges of the movie and slowly, smilingly burrows inward until, once again, it’s all about him. To bide his time, he writes a tell-all book and gives seminars that ask “Is Greed Good?,’’ as if he ever doubted the answer.
If Gekko is the jester on the sidelines, cackling as he predicts imminent financial collapse, Jake is in there pitching as fast as he can. His pet company is a high-tech fusion start-up manned by sweet old Austin Pendleton, but when the film opens, Jake’s investment firm — a frank stand-in for Bear Stearns — is going under. Langella plays Lew Zabel, the head of Keller-Zabel, as tough and avuncular rather than frosty and patrician; he’s a street fighter who has gotten slow, and he’s something to see as he rages at ice-cold rival Bretton James (Josh Brolin) of Churchill Schwartz (a.k.a. JPMorgan and/or Goldman Sachs). The scene is a boardroom at the Fed but the vibe is Shakespearean, complete with Eli Wallach — now officially older than God — stirring the caldron in the corner.
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