Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBoeuf, Josh Brolin, Caery Mulligan, Eli Wallach, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella. 12A cert, gen release, 133 min.

A GREAT DEAL has happened since Oliver Stone, the Bomber Harris of American cinema, delivered his first, characteristically unrestrained assault on the evils of Wall Street. We have had the rise of the internet.

Climate change has given the green movement fresh impetus. A boom of unprecedented length ended with a crash of near unprecedented ferocity. It would require a monumental ego to attempt a comprehensive cinematic summation of all those interacting forces and trends.

Hello, Oliver.

Arriving 23 years after Wall Street, the sequel sometimes plays as if the film-makers have just shot the yellow legal pad on which Stone scribbled his initial notes. Erm, we should do something about energy sustainability. Gotcha: Shia LaBeouf's Jake will be an investment banker with an interest in promoting cold fusion. An aside on the rise of internet activism would be good. Check: Jake's girlfriend, Winnie (Carey Mulligan), runs some sort of green-leaning website. We need to acknowledge how the boom and subsequent collapse affected ordinary folk. Right: Susan Sarandon, as Jake's mum, offers us a former nurse who got drawn into irresponsible property speculation.

So busy and unfocused is the picture that viewers will occasionally feel like they are being shuffled around too many unfamiliar guests at a poorly planned wedding party.

Thank goodness Gordon Gekko is on hand to offer some sort of binding element. Stone’s original film now looks absurdly unsubtle and lumbering, but Michael Douglas’s creation remains a diverting exercise in latter-day Faustean dynamics. Like all the best villains, Gekko offered enough uncomfortable glamour to outshine the more virtuous but less vigorous hero.

The second of two spells in prison seems to have softened Gekko. In the years following his release, he has built up a career as a charismatic public speaker. The new Gordon is not quite a saint, but he does have the good sense – great villains are always the smartest men in the room – to include warnings against financial irresponsibility. Greed can hardly be “good” if it ends up making the greedy penniless.

In an echo of the first film, Jake falls under the shaman’s spell and runs into a major emotional conundrum. Winnie is, you see, Gordon’s daughter and, blaming him for her brother’s suicide, she has vowed to stay far out of Dad’s way.

When the crash hits, the amiable managing director of Keller Zabel Investments (Frank Langella), Jake’s employers, starts to anticipate his own looming annihilation. Meanwhile, a super-mean competitor (Josh Brolin) smells a chance to mop up the frayed remains of gutted financial giants.

Wall Streetwas often guilty of oversimplifying financial intricacies. Its sequel makes the opposite mistake. Large portions of the film are taken up with knotty negotiations concerning the nationalisation of African oil rigs, the minutiae of bank bailouts and many other things that we really should care about, but don't.

There is, throughout the picture, a sense that Stone is making amends for the way (much to his disgust) that too many city traders viewed Wall Streetas an advertisement for unhinged acquisition and personal vulgarity. The mogul is, this time, allowed a degree of humanity before (too late to save the film) he pulls on his braces and begins chewing the heads off newborn babies. If we insist on liking the villain, then that villain will be made a bit less, well, villainous.

Whereas the first film presented financial trading as a glorified board game, Money Never Sleepsstudiously stresses that the business is complex, nuanced and, to the uninitiated, rather confusing. Yes, the film is a mad escapist romp – every apartment has a corner view of the Hudson – but it never forgets to wag its finger at every turn.

In truth, the bankers have already done Stone’s job for him. Few viewers will, rightly or wrongly, regard the operators who engineered the 2008 meltdown as anything other than face-stuffing vandals. The dubious thrill of watching bad people do bad things in deliciously flashy ways is no longer so easy to engineer.

That buzz, of course, was the whole point of the Wall Streetexperience. What we're left with is extravagant, lush, moral and, alas, more than a little boring.