Starring: Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin Director: Oliver Stone Category: IIB
Midway through Oliver Stone's sequel to his seminal Wall Street, Gordon Gekko - the seemingly reconstructed ex-rogue trader who now proclaims 'the mother of all evil is speculation' - meets Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), the maker of his undoing in that first film in 1987.
While Gekko has changed - he's shed the Brylcreemed sleaziness of yore - Fox, beyond some added weight, looks like he hasn't. But he has: the erstwhile upstanding young hero who saved an airline and its workers from Gekko's asset-stripping claws has since made a fortune by reshaping the company and selling it off.
Much could have been made of Fox's eventual return to the profiteering game, but this film doesn't offer pessimism in the form of morally ambivalent characters. However much Gekko is allowed a line about how 'we're all mixed bags', Money Never Sleeps flounders because of its simplistic portrayal of the nature of the financial industry and the people working in it.
Combined with Stone's relentless exposition of glossary and morality, the follow-up film has failed to secure the bite which makes the first movie such a thrilling ride.
Money Never Sleeps begins with Gekko leaving jail in 2001 after finishing an eight-year sentence for fraud, but the story's main engine actually lies with Jacob (Shia LaBeouf), a young trader who wants his firm to invest in long-term renewable energy projects rather than get-rich-quick schemes involving deals with African tyrants with oil fields to spare. Not to stop there, Jacob will be marrying Winnie (Carey Mulligan), who runs an internet news portal. To further complicate (or simplify) the plot, she's Gekko's estranged daughter.