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Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street Review’

With the immortal tagline “Greed is Good” Gordon Gekko earned Michael Douglas his only acting Oscar as Gekko became the poster deity for a generation of Wall Street traders/raiders, who, despite being impotent in pretty much every way except earning the dollar, are at least partially responsible for the healthy and robust economy we find ourselves in at the moment. Thanks.

Even if you don’t remember the movie, you remember the line, and if you were alive then you remember and recoil at the garish BIGness of the 80’s (the hair, the shoulder pads, the awful clash of colors, fuckin’ Wham) as fewer movies captured an era as succinctly as Wall Street. Myself, I try to not have any recollection of the 80s as they were not totally awesome, but at least gas was 74 cents a gallon. Sigh.

So what better time than now for director Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon, W., Natural Born Killers) to revisit Gekko and his dastardly ways as time has shown that the Gordon Gekko of 1987 is a lamb compared to the lions of Wall Street today. As you can guess, any film with today’s economy as a major component in its story structure puts itself in the front running as the Feel-Good movie of the year. So please, don’t throw yourself off a building just yet while you look at the Teddy Ruxpin that used to be your 401K. Maybe you should invest about $10 of the approximately $300 you have left and acquire a ticket to Wall Street 2 as it’s an engaging enough if somewhat tonally mixed sequel to one of the seminal films of the decade where the words “Cyndi Lauper” were relevant.

If you remember from the first Wall Street:

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) has been indicted for insider trading thanks to Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) wearing a wire. You’d think a paranoiac like Gekko would have patted him down, but you remember this was the 80s and homophobic guys all over the world thought you could get AIDS just by touching another man. Fox got a reduced sentence but still went to jail.

Darien Taylor (Daryl Hannah) left Fox in a huff and…

… except for getting her eye torn out in Kill Bill no one has a clue as to what the hell actually happened to Daryl Hannah.

Wall Street 2: Wall Streetier (written by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) opens in 2001 with Gordon Gekko getting out of Federal prison. He’s left with an empty money clip, some Jelly Bracelets, teased hair, and a cell phone the size of a Humvee. How it’s possible he lugged that thing around with one arm without developing a shoulder strain is a mystery. No one is there to pick him up.

Gordon is sad.

We fast forward to 2008 which, as you well remember, was a red-letter year in terms of our nation’s economy. Gordon Gekko is barely hanging around as it seems that Wall Street has passed him by and he’s still looking for a way in. He’s doing the lecture circuit (“You’re all pretty much fucked”) while peddling his new book Is Greed Good?

Money is all that he’s ever lived for as his Ex-wife’s had a nervous breakdown, his son Rudy (the little fat kid from Wall Street 1) is dead because of an overdose, and his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) loathes him.

Speaking of Winnie, she’s writing for a liberal website and is shacking up with an up-and-coming broker named Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf).

Jacob seems to be doing all right despite working for a middle-of-the-road brokerage, a lot like Charlie Sheen at the beginning of the first Wall Street. His boss and mentor Lou (Frank Langella) has just given him a bonus in the low 7 figures, amidst rumors of his firm (called KZI) being in serious financial trouble. Lou assures Jacob that everything will be okay.

Everything is not okay as KZI’s stock nose-dives and the firm is on the verge of completely collapsing.

Lou and other heads of major financial corporations (read: old, rich white guys) meet at a Federal Reserve Bank to discuss what the hell is going on because if firms like KZI can get hammered in such a short amount of time then what’s to stop other well established institutions from being ground down to nothing. I think this is what’s called foreshadowing.

Lou believes something fishy is going on and he thinks his archrival Bretton James (Josh Brolin, rebounding nicely after Jonah Hex) is somehow behind it.

Someone proposes the Feds bail out KZI, but James strongly opposes and offers to buy out KZI at $3 a share. Since KZI’s stock was selling at $79 a share earlier in the month, everyone knows that KZI is pretty much getting A-raped, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Faced with the prospect drastically reducing KZI’s 15,000 person workforce and atonement for appearing in The Box, Lou steps in front of a train. At age 75, Lou’s chances of survival going head-on against a train are not very optimistic. Lou has fallen and he can’t get up.

Jacob is sad.

Faced with the prospect of mortality, Jacob asks Winnie to marry him. She accepts, and hopes their getting married will finally force Jacob to kick Bumblebee out of the house because he’s annoying and you just want him to shut the fuck up.

Behind Winnie’s back, Jacob goes to see Gekko give a lecture and tell him that’s he’s going to marry Winnie. Because you really want to begin a marriage with some deceit. Gekko perks up because this may be his chance to form some kind of reconciliation with his daughter. Gekko sees that Jacob is a hustler just like he is/was so he offers Jacob some (barely) legal insider advice to help Jacob find out the details behind Lou’s suicide, like that Bretton James may have had more to do with KZI’s stock plummeting than is legally allowable. In return, Jacob gives Gekko pictures of Winnie, promises to do his best to facilitate a meeting between them, and gives him Megan Fox’ phone number.

Will Jacob get the truth as to what was really behind Lou’s suicide as he worms his way into Bretton James’ big strong financial arms? Will he also navigate his way around the cesspool the economy’s about to become since he’s about to get married and his mother (Susan Sarandon) keeps hitting him up for money? And is there any excuse for those monkeys in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?

And what of the newly emasculated Gekko? Does he really want to mend things with his daughter, or is there another reason he’s so keen on seeing her?

Well, you won’t get any answers from watching the movie, because Wall Street 2 ends after 40 minutes, leaving you in a dark auditorium wondering what happened to the rest of the film. Because of the economy, there wasn’t enough in the budget to shoot the second and third acts. Sorry.

What works with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps-

1) Yes, he gets hated on because he stars in movies that have huge robots and hot girls, but there isn’t an actor his age that can hold the screen better than Shia LaBeouf. Yes, there’s Jesse Eisenberg possibly if he didn’t play the same nervous shump over and over. But Wall Street 2 is LaBeouf’s movie, as Gekko is a supporting role, and he makes every moment of his arc believable even if you can predict what Jacob’s going to do before he can. Don’t hate him because he’s a better actor than you as A-list directors Steven Spielberg and now Oliver Stone want to work with him. Hate him because he makes more money than you.

2) A mostly wordless dinner scene between Winnie, Gordon and Jacob is the best scene in the movie as you suffocate from the tension of familial wounds being reopened as new ones are being made (“You should know that that name doesn’t mean anything anymore”). If the rest of the movie were as well executed as this scene Wall Street 2 would be great instead of merely adequate.

3) You get to see that Bud Fox turns out okay, maybe even more than okay. But if you remember the first Wall Street, you’d know that his father wouldn’t be too proud.

4) Never has the word “bailout” gotten such a reaction from an audience. Yes, it’s referring to exactly what you think it is and it seems to be a great tension relief moment as the audience jeered when it was mentioned. You half expect someone to throw something at the screen.

5) An Education’s Carey Mulligan proves again why she deserved that Oscar last March a lot more than Sandra Bullock as Gekko’s passionate, yet remarkably clear-eyed daughter. In a couple of years she’ll be the new Kate Winslet, if she isn’t already that now.

What doesn’t work-

1) The movie’s biggest mistake was to make Gekko a kind of Good Guy for the majority of the movie, almost negating Michael Douglas’ performance from the first Wall Street. Yes, times have changed and age and prison might have mellowed Gekko, but his declawing never feels genuine. The scene of Gekko looking at a DVD should have been cut simply for the phoniness factor.

2) What I remember liking a lot about the Wall Street was its distinct lack of preachiness and conveying a message while not seeming like a message movie That can’t be said so much for Wall Street 2 as the “Hey, maybe Greed isn’t so good…unless you can get away with it and even then it has consequences” message is practically shown in subtitles for most of the second half.

Overall. It’s well acted, and more entertaining than not, yet Wall Street 2 never reaches the same level of consequence or staying power as the original. Should it stop you from seeing the movie? Of course not, but to expect more would not be a wise investment.