Premise: Gordon Gekko's future son-in-law finds out why he earned that reputation in the 80s.
Oliver Stone isn't a filmmaker I get excited about. I haven't ever loved a movie of his. I like aspects of them (typically a performance like Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July) and that's about it. What happens almost every time is that I get about 15 minutes into the movie and think "OK, I get it already", then I still have another 2 hours of underlining that same point. Like, Wall Street: Greed is bad. Born on the Fourth of July: the American dream is a lie. JFK: Institutions can't be trusted. Hell, I didn't even need to see W. to figure that one out. The only ones that this doesn't apply to are the ones that baffled me too much to get there. Alexander remains an odd decision that I can't figure out. I spent all of World Trade Center trying to figure out where his cynicism was.
Wall Street is a movie that always bothered me. On a movie fan level, I saw Gordon Gekko as more of a prominent supporting character, so Michael Keaton winning the Lead Actor Oscar never sat well with me. On a more personal level, I'm annoyed by Gekko becoming an icon of sorts for many of the wrong reasons. Simply put, he's a bad guy because he's breaking the law, not because he's greedy. It's essentially the difference between being competitive and cheating. In sports, it's the difference between stat chasers and rule breakers. I wish people would stop misidentifying what's bad about that character.
I can't say I ever independently asked myself "What would Gordon Gekko be up to now?" Still, when I heard that there'd be a sequel to Wall Street, that did prompt me to ask that very question. It turns out, the answer is that he got out of jail and plotted until he found the right opportunity. Sadly, a five-minute answer got made into a 2-hour movie.
I guess I didn't hate Money Never Sleeps. The cast is great. Michael Douglas is perfect as Gordon Gekko. It's just nice to see him on screen in the role. I miss that period when everyone was trying to turn Shia LeBeouf into the next big thing (even though he's not great in this). There's just a lot about this movie I found tedious. It annoyed me how obvious it was that Gekko was going to screw his future son-in-law over. It really doesn't make sense to me that Gekko's daughter hates her father so much but dates a younger version of him. And it's not like the movie is making a point by doing that. It just needs her to be dating LeBeouf to make the story work. Then there's the simple fact that I don't want Gordon Gekko to be softened. What makes him an interesting character is how monomaniacal he is. I don't want to see him as a man who cares about his daughter or unborn grandchild. Oddly, his nuance is in how one-sided he is.
I'll be honest though. My biggest frustration isn't really the movie's fault. I picked this movie because I was in a Carey Mulligan mood, and she was far too sidelined.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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