Of Bears and Bulls

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Dir- Oliver Stone
Cast- Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, Susan Sarandon, Eli Wallach and Frank Langella
Rating- ****

Not everyday can a sequel arrive 23 years after the original and still seem perfectly timed in its relevance. Oliver Stone, facing a phase of diminishing returns in his career this past decade, places his bets rather boldly on taking forward the story of one of his most iconic creations: the Michael Douglas essayed Gordon Gekko character from 1987’s Wall Street- the slick, suave and unscrupulous investor whose arbitrage and inside trading mechanics made him the unofficial yet undisputed Guru of the financial world… a character that has since that film assumed a position in everyday conversations at B-schools. So it is with some surprise then that the first time we hear Gekko (Douglas reprising his Academy Award winning role) speak in this film, he is posing a rejoinder to his own famous ‘Greed Is Good’ remark from that earlier film, by asking us the question, “Is greed good?”

It is a disconcerting, but a wise and apt move when you look at the movie backwards. When Stone made Wall Street back in ’87, his intent was to open the eyes of the public, as he was wont to do in his investigative-journalist brand of filmmaking, to an impending financial doom that those suited auditors and bankers behind their ivory towers would bring upon the nation. Instead, the movie ended up spawning a generation of Gekkos- young students seduced by his power and wealth, stepping out of Ivy Leagues and straight into the corridors of your JP Morgans and what-have-you. So when a young Wall Street trader Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is imparted a cautionary lesson on the perils of what Gekko calls ‘Steroid Banking’, we know that the aforementioned question is actually an astute observation… a wisdom gained after years of imprisonment for embezzlement and tax evasion.

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