23 years ago Oliver Stone gave 80s capitalist culture a face with the emblematic Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and won Michael Douglas an Oscar. Now in light of the recent financial collapse, Stone has revived the character with one of the least expected sequels ever made. It probably wasn’t necessary for Gekko to ever return, but Stone has found an appropriate time and backdrop to reexamine the themes of greed and dirty backdoor deals that works surprisingly well…for a while. The problem is that once the novelty of seeing Douglas reprise his iconic character wears off, there’s nothing really worth exploring in this sequel that wasn’t covered the first time.
The film opens strongly with Gekko being released from prison, issued his comically large cell phone, and let outside to see no one waiting for him (in a hilarious throw away gag a limo pulls up that seems to be for him, but ends up being for a gangster rapper). Then we jump ahead of few years with Gekko who famously said “greed is good” in the last film publishing a book called “Is Greed Good?” He delivers lectures about his former life and predicts the impending stock market crash a few weeks before it happens. At one of these lectures he meets Shia LaBeouf, a rising stock market star who is also engaged to Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan). Gekko becomes a mentor for LaBeouf and helps him hurt the current heir to Gekko’s capitalist douche thrown played by Josh Brolin. Or at least he appears to be helping anyways.
Part of the problem with Wall Street 2 (not the official title, but let’s be honest) is that while in the 80s Oliver Stone had clear villains to tear down, this time there’s no real black and white. The current economic climate is filled with greys and while Stone has a few interesting parallels to draw, there’s no strong statement underlying this film. Other than placing Gekko in the midst of the 2008 meltdown, Stone doesn’t really have much to do with this material and ends up wasting far too much time on LaBeouf’s capitalist idealist and his relationship with Carey Mulligan. There’s no real substance there, but it ends up being the crux of the movie anyways, even transforming Gekko into a good man by the end, which is ridiculous.
The best parts of Wall Street 2 are all variations on scenes from the first film or winking in-jokes. It’s clear why Stone thought it would be a good idea to make a sequel now, but his screenwriters were never able to come up with a decent story to tie it all together. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the film is that Oliver Stone seems to have lost his edge, even forgiving Gordon Gekko by the end. Sure, Michael Douglas once again plays his role perfectly and somehow seems to be elevated as an actor by the character, but what’s the point? Wall Street was an important movie because of what it had to say about the time in which it was made, whereas Wall Street 2 seems to exist simply because it seemed like a good idea on paper. Oliver Stone has lost his bite over the last decade and it’s about time he got it back.
