Review of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) by Shiira — 04 Oct 2010

About Goldman Sachs, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

" After all, the vampiric have no compunction, no second thoughts about bleeding its victims until they're in a cadaverous state of immutable inanition. This is no time for a tempered film about our economy.

But unfortunately, as a result of transforming Gordon Gekko(Michael Douglas) from a villain into an anti-hero, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" can't match Taibbi's rage because the filmmaker is hampered by a vampire squid with qualms about bloodsucking.

Just in case you haven't heard, "Rolling Stone" rocks again. Anybody who's picked up a copy of the hallowed magazine lately, knows that Taibbi's post-crash coverage of our financial marketplace, regularly outshines its music reporting, and now, this somewhat feeble sequel to the 1987 original that co-starred Charlie Sheen(as Bud Fox).

While Gekko was doing time for insider trading, deregulation(the Phil Gramm-orchestrated revocation of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999) paved the way for the vampire squids to steal without amercement, since now there was no government interference to keep those cephalopods honest.

Outside the federal penitentiary on Gekko's release date, a rapper walks straightaway to an awaiting limo that the white collar ex-con presumes is his, which has the accidental effect of recalling the very recent past when musicians were the stars at the musical institution, not the sociopaths that Taibbi regularly writes about.

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" gets bogged down by humanity; its new characters, primarily, Gekko's daughter Winnie(Carey Mulligan) and her fiance Jake Moore(who in a smartly-written film, would have prefigured Winnie's windfall), played by Shia LeBouf, retard the pacing with their earnest love for each other, which seems out of place in a movie where love of money should search and destroy anything pure and unalloyed, and dominate the film's time of possession.

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" needs a heavier heavy to counterbalance all that guppy love. As Bretton James(a stand-in for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein), Josh Brolin, who portrayed George W.

Bush in the filmmaker's last effort(the controversial and sometimes incendiary "W."), needed a scene where he interacts contemptuously with somebody from the general public, a scene in which the moviegoer can see how our ordinariness serves as both mirror and platform for people of his ilk's rampant megalomania.

Considerably less provocative this time out, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" shies away from dramatizing Barack Obama, the sitting president who helped bail out Goldman Sachs and AIG. But he's inferred.

In a brief throwaway shot of black commuters, who, quite pointedly, share the same subway car with Gordon and Jake, the filmmaker creates a juxtaposition between the haves and have-nots, which serves as a sad reminder about how the former senator out of Illinois, essentially lied, reneging on his campaign promise of change, since he retained some key cabinet holdovers from the Bush administration in a plot to maintain the status quo.

By keeping Obama off-screen, however, the film misses a golden opportunity to drive home the point that it's the financial sector which runs our country, stretching its long tentacles up inside the puppet head of our president.

Also off-screen, often for prolongated chunks of time, is Gordon Gekko himself, whose absence reinvents the omnipresent icon from the late-eighties into an inverted version of Hannibal Lecter, the, yes, principled cannibal from Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs".

Whereas the Anthony Hopkins character eats total strangers(he never hurts Clarice Starling), Gekko is willing to eat his own(like Bernie Madoff). But alas, the blood funnel regurgitates Winnie, striking a false note in the way a man such as Gekko would operate, as it's Taibbi's assertion that vampire squids are relentless, entailing an unhappy ending of insolvent portfolios and reamed asses, should one ever cross your path.