Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Review

Money, apparently, never sleeps. So my suggestion is that it watches Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and that should send it off into a nice, restful slumber.

I remember when I first watched the trailers thinking, I have no idea what the story of this film is and my suspicion was that the film didn't either. That suspicion was confirmed upon watching it. The return of a much loved character (either hero or, in this case, villain) is not enough to hang an entire film on, as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull demonstrated in 2008. (There is no fourth film) Also, if you want to examine real world events in the light of the original film then great, but make the decision to do that. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn't know if it's a character drama, examination of the financial crisis, corporate thriller or family drama. It mainly opts for the last one in scene after turgid scene of the most drama free drama I've seen in a long time.

I'm not a massive Oliver Stone fan, even his best films hit you with all the subtlety of a kick to the balls. But his earlier films contain passion, anger, outrage and conviction in abundance and there is simply no way around it, he has lost his bite. W, World Trade Centre (I'm not spelling it "er") the catastrophic Alexander and now Wall Street, these are films lacking any of the urgency of, say, Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, JFK or Nixon. Even if you think any or all of those films are misguided, at the very least they are about something; they have something to say. The best thing you can say about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is that it's nice to see Michael Douglas onscreen again, even if his screen time is way too limited. In the end the film is just soul-crushingly, stupifyingly dull.

2/10