Review: ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ Is Messy But Still Entertaining

As soon as that dopey 75th Anniversary version of the 20th Century Fox logo dissipates, the first sounds we hear in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” are of a prison gate opening, and someone shuffling through it. It’s followed up by a good gag: Michael Douglas, as Gordon Gekko, the role that nabbed him a Best Actor Academy Award oh-so-many moons ago, collecting his personal belongings, having intoned to him gravely by a prison guard, things like “A money clip with no money in it” and a briefcase-sized cellular telephone.

It’s when he walks out of the prison, though, that the current state of his character is really revealed: there’s no one there to pick him up. The year is 2001 and Gordon Gekko is hopelessly alone; bridges burned, prestige squandered, his slicked-back hair has gone slack and gray, and he looks more like a teacher of comparative literature at Hampshire College than a wolf of Wall Street. And just as soon as we’re introduced to shaggy Gordon Gekko, we leave him. We flash forward 7 years and are introduced to the real central character of ‘Money Never Sleeps,’ Shia LaBeouf, continuing his fine career path of being “younger versions of already established characters,” as an enterprising trader named Jake Moore.

Jake, unlike Gordon, has some moral bearing, at the very least: he’s been tutored, affectionately, by the head of his firm, Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella), and has at least one earth-conscious venture he’s trying to funnel money towards (it involves lasers; don’t ask us). When it becomes apparent that the corporation is going under, Zabel makes a desperately plea to the Feds to be bailed out. Here he’s met with resistance, chiefly from the film’s villain, a smarmy hedge fund shark named Bretton James (Josh Brolin) who wears really well tailored-suits (you can tell by the sharp angle of his shirt collars). Devastated, Zabel takes his own life.

If there is any emotional hook to hang the big, ungainly hat of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” on, it’s revenge. Jake wants revenge on Bretton James for killing his company and causing his mentor to commit suicide, and in order to exact said revenge, he makes a devil’s bargain with Gordon Gekko. Gekko, it’s revealed, wasn’t imprisoned for the charges Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox lobbied against him as a result of the first movie, no, he was put away by somebody else altogether (who could it be? Oh right it’s Josh Brolin, that was fairly obvious).

And what does Gordon want in return? He wants to reconnect with his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), who just so happens to be engaged to driven, determined Jake. But is Gordon actually ready to make amends for being a dickish, reptilian asshole? Or will he go back to his old ways again, with the slicked-back hair, and go-go Reagan-era ethos? This should be fairly obvious, too.

The first “Wall Street” was made before Oliver Stone made bold, splashy, big budget movies that often incorporated extremely experimental elements (at least editorially), and for all of its big talk about consumerism and greed it was rigidly formulaic, as square as anything else in Reagan’s America. This film is happening after Stone has gotten his ya-yas out and gone back to making oddly mundane movies, like the toothless “W.,” and it’s good to see him having fun again. Stone adds some pretty embellishments (iris ins, split screens, overlapping images, camera movements that scale entire buildings) and the movie moves along at a clip, even if it is at least 20 minutes too long. Kudos should be also handed to composer Craig Armstrong, with a nicely atmospheric score (the less said about Stone’s insistence on using some Brian Eno/David Byrne songs, the better).

But “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is a mess; this much is certain. There’s so much going on, both visually and plot-wise, that, coming out of the movie, you’re not sure exactly what the thing was about. It’s peppered with genuinely touching moments, but they often gets lost in a swarm of subplots and byzantine finance world mumbo jumbo that is rarely, if ever, explained. Was the movie a barbed critique of the current economic crisis? Was it a character piece about a reptilian alpha male who learns to become human again? Was it a revenge parable? A love story, maybe? Or a whirligig look at the way that the financial system works (visualized, gloriously, as glittery towers of information)? Maybe it’s all of these things; or none. The raw power of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is that it leaves you with the sensation that none of that really matters; that no matter how scatter-shot the film may seem it is unifying in one key way — it’s really, really entertaining. And as good as greed is, for a big budget Hollywood confection, solid entertainment is even better. [B]