For 23 years the world has been quoting Oliver Stone's Wall Street. You know the line: "Greed is good." But few people appear to have hung around for the end of that film, which featured Michael Douglas's iconic Gordon Gekko being arrested, presumably to be locked up for his adherence to that sentiment. Greed ultimately wasn't good to Gekko, or to anyone in the film.

And that was the point.

In Wall Street, Stone was at the top of his game, brilliantly lashing out against the excesses of the financial services industry, the gray line of legality in which it often operates, and the devastating impact it can have on American industry, wrecking companies and destroying jobs while it enriched a few starched shirts.

But that's all history. Wall Street was a terse warning to the world that it was all a house of cards, but its lessons were ignored in favor of a catchy motto. Gekko became not a pariah for the industry but a hero, his work celebrated by slick shysters instead of being decried.

And then it all finally fell apart.

23 years later Stone has returned to one of his greatest characters, plucking him out of the '80s and, after a long time in prison, dropping him into 2008, just in time for the biggest financial debacle in a century. And it's a film that many Americans probably need to see.

Stone plays it pretty fast, wrapping the Wall Street of the late 2000s into a monolithic film. All the buzzwords of the financial page are here: Complex derivatives. Mortgage defaults. Alternative energy. Government bailouts. Credit default swaps. Moral hazard. "Too big to fail." If you didn't get enough of this stuff on CNBC two years ago, you will now.

And that's a good thing, because Stone proves surprisingly adept at distilling the 2008 financial crisis into a very watchable film. It all begins with a dramatization of the Lehman Brothers meltdown (here known as Keller Zabel) and the vultures (Churchill Schwartz subbing in for Goldman Sachs) who come in to scoop up the company's assets in the ensuing fire sale. Stone humanizes all the players, of course: Frank Langella's kindly old Louis Zabel takes young Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) under his wing, before promptly jumping in front of a subway train after he has his head handed to him by Churchill's Bretton James (a hamfisted Josh Brolin).

The ensuing story is one of revenge as Jake attempts to pay back James for his actions. It just so happens that he's dating one Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), and her dad's just about to get out of the joint and is all too eager to help guide Jake along.

Stone's script bounces between financial wheeling and dealing and personal drama (Winnie despises dad, Jake has a heart of green) with aplomb, while Gordon offers a series of not-quite-as-quotable platitudes indicating he's a changed man. Gekko rips the financial industry apart (and he has a book to sell), and his tasteful yet modest apartment would indicate all he really wants to do is reconcile with Winnie instead of get rich. If only it were so simple.

Wall Street 2 could so easily have come across as a bad joke, sour grapes from someone who probably lost a lot of money in the 2008 collapse and who's angry that the world didn't listen to him the first time around. And in fact, Stone reminds us of the first Wall Street repeatedly in his film, from the catchy David Byrne soundtrack to many an homage to the 1987 classic. I won't spoil them here, but I will say the only thing missing to complete the film is Daryl Hannah.

Stone hasn't quite outdone his prior effort here -- he's too enamored with goofy visuals (soap bubbles as symbolism? Really?) and the acting is a bit over the top from start to finish - but Wall Street 2 succeeds in one way where the original did not. The first Wall Street was a novelty, a circus show about a world the average consumer didn't know a thing about. In the 20 years since, we've all gotten sucked into the world of high finance. We all live in this world now, like it or not. And Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps tells a story that we can all relate to, God help us.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.