Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)

Oliver Stone unwisely returns to the scene of the crime twenty years later with the iconically unscrupulous trader Gordon Gekko seemingly a new man upon his release from prison, albeit still spouting aphorisms on the nature of greed. Shia LaBeouf takes the Charlie Sheen role this time round as a junior stock broker with delusions of ethics taken in by the meretricious patter of his prospective father-in-law.
It's difficult to say what Stone thinks he's doing with this reconstituted piece, bar coming back to cash in one more time on the instant of his success as Gekko ends up doing when he inevitably shows his true colours. There's an attempt to justify the continuation by having a half-baked go at the subprime market crisis, but it's severely undermined first and foremost by Stone's worship of power in all its guises. It's just a bit of a handicap when you're meant to be attacking the ruthlessness of speculative capitalism to devote so much time to making the splurging and cock-waving lifestyles of its proponents look desirable. Not that it helps when the forces of 'good' are represented by the couple of a badly miscast and simpering Carey Mulligan as Gekko's vaguely activist daughter and the charisma vacuum that is LaBeouf, a walking piece of hissy bumfluff who could probably ruin any film single-handed even without the help of a script scribbled on bog roll and pitifully posturing dialogue alternating with David Byrne's whining coffee-table soundtrack.

3/10