WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

title: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS
year: 2010
cast: Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Eli Wallach
writer/director: Oliver Stone
rating: *

Michael Douglas returns as "Gordon Gekko", the villainous love-to-hate stock market pirate from Oliver Stone's first outing, a lightweight classic starring Charlie Sheen as a climber who learns from Gekko how to cut corners and make a ton of money. In that film, Gekko convinces us that greed is good. Now, eight years after being released from prison for insider-trading, he's not so sure... of anything. He has a book to sell, but heaven knows what it's about since Gekko doesn't preach good or evil. He's an ambiguously vacant bore, just like Shai LaBeouf, looking like a college freshman playing broker, engaged to Gekko's estranged, mopey daughter. An extremely bland Douglas provides a side-character role, advising Shia on overthrowing evil Josh Brolin, whose one-dimensional baddie is a weak replacement for the young Gekko... but there's no seduction into power: just a dully conceived, revenge-driven motive without any purpose. And the stock market crash of 2008, shown during the third act, adds nothing to the overall nothingness.