Holy Crap Does Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Ever Suck
name a more iconic duo!
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In 2010 Oliver Stone made a sequel to arguably the quintessential 1980s movie—Wall Street—with Michael Douglas reprising his Oscar-winning turn as giddily greedy shark Gordon Gekko that is remembered primarily for having one of the stupidest and mockable subtitles in motion picture history: Money Never Sleeps.
That can’t make Stone happy. But it’s preferable to the film itself being remembered for being stupid and eminently mockable. Going into the film I foolishly imagined that it couldn’t possibly be brazen enough to shoehorn that infamous subtitle into the film’s dialogue.
I was wrong! Gecko tells Jacob Moore, a young buck played by a deeply unlikeable Shia LaBeouf, everyone’s favorite, “She lies in bed at night with you, looking at you, one eye open. Money’s a bitch that never sleeps. And she’s jealous! If you don’t pay close, close enough attention, you wake up in the morning and she might be gone forever.”
I was legitimately gob-smacked at Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ awfulness. And I say that as someone who thinks that Oliver Stone’s movies are like my ex-wife’s Meatloaf Surprise: not good!
That’s not the only time Stone crams iconic turns of phrase into the movie’s poor dialogue. While in prison for financial chicanery, economic monkeyshines and fiscal tomfoolery Gecko writes a book called Is Greed Good?
That’s his famous catchphrase from Wall Street but with the words all mixed up and different punctuation! In case you somehow do not know that Gecko’s big catchphrase, at one point the infamous icon of Reagan-era greed enthuses awkwardly, “Someone reminded me the other evening that I once said greed is good.”
The unwieldiness and mindless wastefulness of the line is painful to me. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps REALLY does not need to remind audiences that Gecko said that famous thing in the last movie. It particularly did not need him to say all that nonsense when “I once said greed is good” would more than suffice.
He follows it up by quipping, “Now, it seems, it’s legal.” It gets a HUGE laugh from the audience despite simultaneously not making a lick of a sense and also being false. Greed has ALWAYS been legal. It’s the essence of capitalism and American life.
Stone and screenwriters Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff have the chutzpah to give Douglas a big speech that’s close enough to his “Greed is good” monologue from the original to suffer terribly by comparison.
It’s a monologue full of nonsense about how greed has somehow only gotten greedier over time but it is rapturously received by an audience that wants us to know that Gecko DEFINITELY has still got it.
Gecko tells the young people that they’re part of the NINJA generation. They acquired that name because they have No Income, No Jobs and No Assets. All they have are throwing stars , and those are illegal in most states.
“This guy’s fantastic, man” Jacob enthuses unconvincingly of Gekko’s decidedly less than fantastic speech.
When I heard that Oliver Stone, the hotshot, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Platoon, Scarface and Midnight Express was making a sequel to Wall Street over two decades after the original defined a decade I assumed it was because a script for it had been written that was so good that it angrily demanded to be made.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have an irresistible script or a script whose brilliance can’t be denied. It doesn’t even have a good script. It just has a script but that somehow was enough to inspire Stone to get at least a member or two of the old band back together (Douglas, pretty much, and Charlie Sheen briefly) and go back into Wall Street business.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps could not be less essential. The miscalculations begin with casting the always regrettable Shia LaBeouf in the lead role of a cocky Wall Street hotshot with a soul who falls under Gordon Gecko’s spell while dating his estranged daughter.
It’s hackneyed and self-serving to say of a famously troubled, terrible figure, “I never liked him anyway” not to mention meaningless, but I have always been puzzled by Shia LaBeouf’s popularity.
He is an unusually unlikable performer who gets too much hate for ruining the Indiana Jones franchise and not enough hate for ruining the Wall Street movies. That’s right, I said movies. It’s so bad that it somehow makes Wall Street worse as well.
In a decidedly sideways move, Stone replaced Charlie Sheen, a famously debauched, violent libertine with a horrifying, horrifyingly public history of abusing drugs and terrorizing women with Shia LaBeouf, a famously debauched, violent libertine with a horrifying, horrifyingly public history of abusing drugs and terrorizing women.
#Winning!
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opens, pointlessly, with Gekko getting out of jail in 2001, then jumps irritatingly ahead seven years to 2008, Bratz: The Movie, style.
Jacob Moore is dating Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan) and working for Louis "Lou" Zabel (Frank Langella), an old lion who represents, like Martin Sheen in the original, the dignity and integrity of an older generation.
Then poor Lou tosses himself in front of a train and our cocky hero finds himself with two malevolent mentors/father figures in the macho and aggressive Bretton James (Josh Brolin) and Douglas’ Gekko.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ plot turns largely on the revelation that Gekko, one of the most iconic bad guys in the history of film, is, in fact, a bad guy and not to be trusted and may actually be manipulating Jacob for his own selfish ends.
Late in the film Charlie Sheen returns as Bud Fox for a single staggeringly anti-climactic party scene. Sheen shows up, says he’s doing good, mingles briefly with Gekko and then leaves forever.
Sheen’s insanely arbitrary cameo is the film in a nutshell: a lifeless, unnecessary return that never comes close to justifying its existence.
The painful arbitrariness of Sheen’s presence reminded me of Be Cool, where Danny DeVito was technically the only cast member returning from Get Shorty other than John Travolta but DeVito is in the movie so little, and makes such a minuscule impact despite being, you know, Danny DeVito, that his appearance feels contractually obligated.
DeVito and Sheen might as well turn directly to the camera in Be Cool and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and tell the audience, “I’m technically in this movie so none of you assholes can complain about only one original star returning. Now it’s time for a massage, a martini and a nap.”
Jacob is gung ho to invest in a fusion project run by the always welcome Austin Pendleton and must weather a fierce economic storm and the stormy and mercurial personalities of two men who embody the macho, winner takes all ethos of Wall Street in unusually pure form.
It’s Wall Street all over again but with the energetic vulgarity of the original replaced with a heavy-handed listlessness.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is utterly devoid of surprises with the prominent exception of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s songs.
I had no idea that these two legends provided much of the music for Money Never Sleeps. The tunes they provide could not be less conducive to the tone of the film. Byrne being Byrne, his contributions are quirky and gentle, at once guileless and child-like in their homemade philosophizing. Stone’s movie, in sharp contrast, is slick, macho and histrionic.
There’s a fascinating disconnect between Money Never Sleeps and Byrne and Eno’s songs that represents the film’s only remotely interesting or unexpected component.
When they finish up the trilogy in 2033 with a deeply troubled young actor of the future slipping into the Sheen and LaBeouf role, I hope it’s a full-on musical with songs by Byrne and Eno.
At least that would set it apart from first film.
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