Film Review - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the sequel to the popular 1987 film from Oliver Stone, who also directs this movie, the story this time is that Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas is now out of jail and wants back in on the game of financial trading, and Jake Moore played by Shia LaBeouf may just be the key to do just that.

Before I give you my overall thoughts I'm going to regal you with a tale of woe, I had really been looking forward to this movie and it was the last of the year that held my interest and as the release date approached I got excited and was anticipating my chance to get to my cinema to see it, sadly the powers that be conspired against me and the afternoon session I desired slipped through my fingers, making me VERY unhappy but I held out hope that this was only for the first week but as the second rolled around again my hopes were dashed, but after that second week the film stopped playing, and my anger grew big time but as fate would have it, I was thrown a bone and a session fell into my lap.

4 long weeks after the film's national release.

And with that, I now have seen the film and you're probably asking "how was it"; well sad to say that it's not terrible, mainly because of Douglas himself, he inhabits Gordon Gekko in the same way that James Earl Jones is the true voice of Darth Vader, sadly outside of him the film is predictable and at times fairly dull to watch, mainly because both of the family and finance stories don't mesh, in the first film the family story and the financial story meshed together into a cohesive whole, here that doesn't happen.

Another big problem is that unlike the first film, there is the lack of a strong villain, again in Wall Street 1 there was the Terence Stamp character as well as Gordon to rally behind, here Josh Brolin is fairly weak as is Shia, the centre of the film again just as Michael Cera was in Scott Pilgrim, he's a dead weight.

Overall, this is not a terrible sequel but it feels perfunctory and frankly, not worth your time and believe me, after waiting 4 long weeks to see it, I write it with a heavy heart, only a 2 out of 5 overall, money may never sleep but sometimes, people do.