Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a class act.
Twenty-three years and one financial meltdown later, Gordon Gekko returns to entertaining if hardly seismic effect. More footnote than follow-up, Street 2 offers wryly nostalgic amusement.
This subject demands a Godfather Part II, but Stone and collaborators have turned in a Godfather Part III. There is a lot of good material, but LaBeouf nearly sinks it and we could use much more of the old Gekko brimstone.
Wall Street 2 does little more than lay out the penitential harvest festival in the church of hindsight.
Unlike the first film, Money Never Sleeps is a reaction to events that have already played out and, as such, there's a weirdly nostalgic about it, right down to Stone's use of some of the same Talking Heads songs on the soundtrack that he used first time around. It makes for a much less excoriating film, and at times even slips into self-parody.
Compared to what has gone before, it’s all rather flat.
As to this sequel's sub-title: well, it may well be true that money never sleeps. But you will.
Wall Street 2 has an entertaining first half-hour and mostly avoids the glaring mistake of the earlier movie. It tries not to glorify the people it was intending to attack. But it's far too long at 130 minutes, and the ending is weak, conventional and far too convenient.
That this less ambitious enterprise winds up a slushy quest for personal redemption is still a damn shame.
It’s more a character study than a thriller but it’s still tremendous fun.
It's true to life, but a decent plot would have helped, not to mention a bit more gutsiness.
It's in the texture of character and drama, not real life, where this sequel falls short.
None of its many plot strands is given sufficient prominence for us to care about it, and the hurried way they're all tied up at the end is just silly.
This is crude, slippery stuff that carefully avoids confronting the evolution of capitalism or coming to grips with the present moral and economic climate.
'Gekko was as good a villain as you're ever going to find'.
Whatever happened to the real Gordon Gekkos?
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General release. Check local listings for show times.
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