All posts tagged sequel

It has been two weeks since I saw ‘Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps’ ; and I have to say its been incredibly difficult to summarize my thoughts on the film.

I was anticipating the sequel to Oliver Stone’s seminal 1987 film for many reasons:

1. I was a massive fan of the first film, it was a gritty, dark film and a great character study from a film-maker who had something to say.
2. Michael Douglas hasn’t been on the movie radar for a while; and I consider him an excellent actor. From ‘Romancing The Stone’ to ‘Falling Down’ to even ‘Traffic’…He is always fantastic, he just never really exposes himself as often as he could; barring the odd little film, like ‘Wonder Boys’.
3. Oliver Stone was returning to direct the sequel, and even though his last few efforts (ahem, ‘Alexander’) have been garbage; he is required viewing.
4. The film featured Carey Mulligan, who is one of my favorite upcoming actresses after her spellbinding performance in ‘An Education’.

‘Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps’ did not fulfill any of these things for me.

I walked out of the film dazed. I flat out hated the picture.

All of the elements were in place for the film to have worked. So why did it fail so badly?

The film opens on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis. We are re-introduced to the Gordon Gekko character immediately: He exits prison and we soon find out he has written a book whilst inside. Ridiculously named; “Is Greed Good”, I’d like to say this was the first bad sign but it wasn’t…

Simultaneously we meet Jakob; who is played by Shia Lebeouf. Jacob is a young up and comer in the Wall Street scene, but he takes risks. Like everyone should invest in h20 fusion technology because Oliver Stone can’t help but shove Global Warming messages into the picture (and he really goes to town: you even get motion graphic ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ sequences that explain fusion technology).

Well anyway, Jakob’s mentor dies under mysterious circumstances, and things complicate when Bretton James, the Hedge fund manager (Josh Brolin) seems involved in the mentors death. Things further convolute when Jakob begins taking advice from Gordon Gekko (Douglas), because, you see, Jakob is dating Gekko’s daughter; Winne (Carey Mulligan) and Winnie wants nothing to do with her father, and then, well It’s very, very unnecessarily complicated to say the least.

Here are the three story-lines of the movie broken down for you:

A) Jacob maintaining his relationship with Winnie

B) Jacob/Winnie/Gordon

C) Bretton James and the financial crisis

Guess which storyline takes up 65% of the film? If you said A you would be wrong. If you said B you would be close. Yes, the trials of Bretton James and the financial crisis takes up the majority of the running time! This decision is so incredibly confusing, especially considering that this is a sequel to the Gordon Gekko character. Well, Bretton he happens to be an old rival of Gekko’s who is subverting the stock-market for his own gain. In the film they make a point that Bretton purposefully accelerates the financial crisis, however I’m not sure how, because the answer is buried in excessive technobabble. I suppose Bretton begins the financial crisis by driving Jakob’s mentor to suicide. This allows the financial crisis to start because subsequently wants some sweet, sweet revenge, so he teams up with good old Gordon. If you could follow the Wall Street stuff good on you, but I was here for the Gordon Gekko character not a economics lesson. Thankfully Oliver Stone gives us some Gordon Gekko, oh but here’s the thing:

Only about 15 minutes of screen time are given to Gordon Gekko.

Douglas gets 30 -2 minute scenes sprinkled though-out the film, and if he isn’t spouting cheesy catchphrases, then he is detailing some visual motif that Stone is obsessed with. It seems like a script just flat out about the financial crisis that was later re-written to include him. I can see that being the case because, the film tries earnestly to be a commentary on how Wall Street could have avoided the crisis, and at points it gets close to this. Ultimately it just devotes huge chunks of its story to boardroom meetings and discussions that are so filled with jargon and techno-babble that not only is it irritating; its impenetrable.

Stone never stops to help you out if you are un-initiated, and if you are like me and are having nothing but a basic understanding of the stock exchange, these scenes will wind up long and tedious for you, and because not a single bit of character development or context is given during them, its just infuriating. A film is about character and story, not a sixth grade Michael Moore type lecture.

I suppose Oliver Stone couldn’t help himself and thus parades the screen with irrelevant technobabble, diagrams, info-graphics and line graphs. None of it goes very far, especially when considering that we are supposed to be invested in the movie because of Shia Lebeouf’s Jakob; who more often than not; doesn’t even appear in these scenes at all.

Shia Lebeouf, I think he’s a good actor. Most of the time he does very well; even in films that aren’t so good, like ‘Transformers’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull’. He is fine enough in ‘Wall Street 2’; but I feel that he is miscast. He is just too young to play a Wall Street shark. The role requires someone who wouldn’t be out of place in the neck and neck bloodsport that is stockbroking, maybe someone a bit more travelled; I.e Charlie Sheen. Its also Lebeouf’s age that works against him most of the film.  to give him some credit, he barely has a character, and in the quiet scenes with Douglas and Mulligan he does shine a little.

Carey Mulligan, however, is just wasted as Winne. All her character is required to do is cry and moan. It’s actually a pretty misogynistic character, for example one scene she cries for five minutes, and as soon as Lebeouf gives her a diamond ring all is fine. All a woman needs is jewelry right? She is very talented and can clearly pull off a performance like this in her sleep. Mulligan, who is is British, does a very good American Accent, but thats all she really was given to do besides cry. It’s probably the second mistake the film made, after rubbishing Gordon Gekko.

Like Mulligan, Josh Brolin is similarly underused. Nothing is required of him but to spout convoluted stock-market babble and to be brooding. It is as if Oliver Stone needed some sort of conflict to counteract the storyline and morphed Brolin’s character into a two bit villain. It doesn’t work and only serves to undermine the idea that money can warp a person and thus affect an economy. In ‘Money Never Sleeps’ It’s not money that affects Bretton James and the economy, it is just that he is evil…and that evil must be stopped. I kept wondering when his layers where going to be pulled…but it never came. There is never an inkling of an understanding of why Bretton James is the way he is (besides a cheap allusion to a Francisco Goya Illustration- which I can’t take as sufficient), I can’t find a reason for his lengthy screen-time, and I think Stone’s decision to parade scene after scene of his crap so damages the film, that it never recovers from it.

Like with the aforementioned Goya illustration; Stone attempts to summarize each character with a visual metaphor. Gordon Gekko gets the aging tulip: A framed tulip that was once worth millions, now dusty and hanging on a wall. Jakob he gets a bubble, and yes we get endless shots of a bubble floating above Wall Street “just waiting to burst”. Bretton, he gets the painting, and Carey Mulligan gets a diamond ring. Stone introduces the motifs and you understand them immediately because of how simplistic they are. Then a character has to explain the item out loud; then you are subjected to the item reappearing every fifteen minutes just to, you know, remind you that Shia Lebeouf is a bubble about to burst or whatever. It is just plain infuriating and condescending. The fact that Oliver Stone never gives us anything else to understand the character makes them completely un-relatable and pedestrian.

The film is littered with these problems: Why would Winnie Gekko be in love with Shia Lebeouf and vice versa? What makes Bretton James the way he is? Why does Gordon Gekko appear at all? Everybody in the movie is cardboard and Stone presents them as though they are incredibly complex. It’s amazingly pretentious.

There are no real characters in ‘Wall Street 2’, and once the movie is over and you see that the cliched characters ended up exactly where you thought they would; it’s just depressing. How could Oliver Stone go from the dark, gritty, character driven ‘Wall Street’ to this!?

It’s not just the characters and the storyline; everything else about the movie just screams laziness. I already brought up how the movie seems as if it were written solely about the financial crisis and then they shoehorned Gekko into it afterwards, well I really believe that. This film doesn’t even cinematically sit alongside the first ‘Wall Street’. Sure it takes place in New York, but gone is the energetic, axe to grind Oliver Stone: The man who had something to say; the man who made films that kicked against the against the curb, not sat on it.

The Oliver Stone of ‘Wall Street 2’ is that: A curb sitter. A commercial, pedestrian film-maker. This is a sell out movie. And after the disaster that was ‘Alexander’ I can see why he made this film. A commercial safe property that would get his name out there. There is that saying: “make a movie for the studio, then make one for yourself”. I’m almost certain thats what has happened here. Its just so impossibly hackneyed and commercial that Stone couldn’t possible have been invested in it.

Otherwise the whole proceedings wouldn’t just plod along, there wouldn’t be anything predictable about it. Alas, all we do is go from cliched scene to cliched scene and the camera just boringly sits there. The same ‘Talking Heads’ songs play. The same establishing shots of New York play. Then its standard wide shot, medium shot, cut to the close up. Its all so boring; even Michael Douglas appears to be sleepwalking throughout the minimum screen time he has.

If Stone can’t be bothered anymore than why should anyone else be?

The only thing this movie does well, is it retroactively destroys the first ‘Wall Street’ film. The reason everybody is going to shows up to this movie is Gordon Gekko, and Stone has turned him into nothing but a parody of his old self.

In Douglas’s thinly spread 15 minutes of screen-time he does nothing but paraphrase dialogue from the first film; or neatly summaries an idea behind a tulip or a bubble…or explain the fu*king tagline!…Man, that “money never sleeps” scene is atrocious. It almost broke the fourth wall in how patronizing it was.

With all the exposition and Wall Street techno-babble you would think the movie would be a little deeper than “money never sleeps” but it isn’t. The poster itself is a better piece of work: at least you can interpret and enjoy it.

Maybe, its just me; but the film seemed like an exercise, almost purposefully a joke…It started that way; I thought “Hey, we might be getting a comedic Wall Street movie” but after the first scene that was it in terms of laughs.

If you have seen the trailer, you will have seen the first scene of the film: It is off Gordon leaving Prison. This moment was funny and topical and had some depth. It was at this point that I thought Stone might have made a brave decision and directed Douglas into a winking, self-referential, almost comical performance of Gekko…but that quickly proved not to be the case. This character; it didn’t even seem to be the same character at all. If the point was that Gekko had changed so drastically from being in Prison, then why would he still be trading, and, and,  sigh.

It ultimately feels as if Gekko was originally written as someone else and wasn’t even spiced up to suit Douglas once it was changed. It’s pretty obvious that the Gekko character was the last thing on Stone’s mind; as you could virtually remove his character from the entire movie and it wouldn’t make a difference (Unless you consider the ending – but I can’t spoil that here – but let me assure you, its a horrific train-wreck of a final act, and they should have known better than to end the movie like this).

In the end the whole thing feels like a ‘Scary Movie’ type parody of the first Wall Street film, except that they forgot to add the laughs.

‘Wall Street’ should have just been left alone.

1 out of 10.