‘Money Never Sleeps’ is never boring

September 24, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Movie

Wall Street 2 (AKA Money Never Sleeps)

Gordon Gekko, fresh from prison, re-emerges into a much harsher financial world than the one he left. He now has to play catch-up and redefine himself in a different era. He has to become relevant again. But a young, idealistic investment banker learns the hard way that Gekko is still a major manipulator and if there's one place where you can redefine yourself, one place where your relevance is a deal away, it's Wall Street.

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By Roger Moore

Orlando Sentinel

There’s too much worth chewing over in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” sequel, “Money Never Sleeps,” to dismiss it out of hand.

Sure, it’s old fashioned — ’80s old fashioned, from the Tom Cruise-cocky way Shia LaBeouf plays his cocky, earnest young hot-dog investment analyst to the dated ironic wailing of David Byrne on the soundtrack.

It’s almost kitschy — the way Stone injects himself into a couple of scenes, an eccentric Eli Wallach cameo, the inclusion of a Charlie Sheen moment that flat-out winks at the audience.

But before it goes off the rails, we’re treated to a vintage Stone history lesson — the stock market meltdown and Fed intervention as seen through the eyes of the conspiracy buff who served up “J.F.K.” Lovely performances surround the leads — LaBeouf and Michael Douglas, back as Gordon Gekko. Terrific moments of regret play out. And then the script lets everybody down, the cliches pile up like junk bonds and you wonder if the cinema’s resident mad genius is just too angry or too confused by who to blame.

LaBeouf is Jacob Moore, a whiz-kid energy investment expert at a firm where his sainted mentor (Frank Langella, brilliant) is watching a lifetime of work meltdown with the rest of Wall Street. The stock market’s derivatives confidence game has lost confidence, and soon only the schadenfreude-eating grin of a hated competitor (Josh Brolin) remains.

Jacob’s girlfriend, Winnie (Carey Mulligan) runs a non-profit left-leaning news website. They live spectacularly well, but she feeds his idealism. He takes a job with a hated competitor and continues pushing a fusion company that could solve the world’s energy problems.

But then there’s Winnie’s last name — Gekko. She’s Gordon Gekko’s estranged daughter, who blames dad’s greed for all that went wrong in their family. Douglas’ Gekko has aged into something of a lizard himself — a rumpled, lonely ex-con who now makes a living selling his “Is Greed Good?” book and lecturing. Winnie isn’t buying his “reform” and doesn’t want Dad back in her life, but Jacob nobly conspires to change her mind. And maybe use Dad’s expertise.

Revenge and redemption wrestle in this confused Allan Loeb-Stephen Schiff screenplay.

“Money Never Sleeps” is never boring, even as its plot descends into cheap melodrama and the script runs out of banter about the “the NINJA generation — no income, no job, no assets.”

But to borrow a phrase from the film and from financial regulators, it’s a movie with a “moral hazard,” as in it can’t decide who or what is moral. That makes it a less self-assured film than the original, less important. How bad does America’s money situation have to be for it to confound even Oliver Stone & Co.?