Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

The plot of the second Wall Street movie is not very engaging, but decent dialogue, excellent acting performances, a few nice cameos and an irresistible visual homage to Manhattan make it an elegant pleasure not just for film geeks. (17/09/2010)

It's like flipping through the Wall Street Journal and Woman's World. The former spouts a lot of financial terms, the latter a bland romance. I don't understand the former and I’m not enjoying the latter. And speed-up shots of Manhattan aren’t directorial finesse anymore, Oliver. I give it three shareholder points solely for the good actors. (12/11/2010)

For me, as a Czech viewer, this film was quite difficult. I couldn't predict the situations, I had no idea how the film would turn out. You get lost in some concepts at times, but then a single gesture from Shia LaBeouf helps you find yourself. His character here shows his love of money perfectly. His eyes light up every time it is mentioned. I'm glad Shia's partner was Carey Mulligan instead of some long-legged blonde. Carey gave the film a bit of humanity. The only thing that bothered me about the movie was the "flying camera". That is, the shots where the camera licks the skyscraper from the top down and back. The viewer’s eyes glaze over and they get dizzy. At times like that, my head dropped and I got bored. (19/10/2010)

Great directing, excellent acting performances, Shia is faultless and Michael Douglas desperately needed Gekko for his comeback, but somehow I’m not sure we really needed another Wall Street. Nevertheless, Stone is good at comebacks. You’re all fucked. You may not know it, but you are the N.I.N.J.A. generation. No income, no job, no assets. You have a lot to look forward to. (03/12/2010)

I would have expected a slightly more aggressive script from Oliver Stone, but most things can still be absorbed quite well. I would have appreciated less Shia LaBeouf and more Michael Douglas. The love storyline is not a problem and fits excellently into the concept. Making the entire film only about an imaginary bubble wouldn't be particularly valuable. Excellent camera work and a tribute to modern times. Completely different from the first film, but twenty years is after all a long hiatus. (09/10/2010)

Together with Snowden, hands down the best and most personal job by Oliver Stone in this century. It exudes director-power and just following the camera movements among the skyscrapers of Manhattan is a joy, not to mention the performances of Douglas, Langella and Brolin, who breath more than just life into their characters (and to be fair, LaBoeuf is not bad, either). But I didn’t quite like the way the story goes and where (and especially how) it ends up. It’s very clear why Stone decided to resurrect financial beast Gordon Gekko a year after the crisis that brought down many companies and shook the currency – so he could put a mirror in front of the financial and stock-market system and, through an unpredictable bastard, tell a complex metaphor of a big bubble that can pop at any time, regardless of whether you play fair or not. That’s fine, though an experienced director like Stone could have ignored those flying bubbles. On top of that, we also follow a pretty generic family plot and the reminiscences of the story of the first movie in the new era (and with a reformed character), but what Stone pushes to the fore are those less interesting family motifs. And then we reach the ending, where one greedy person gets punished but the rest live on happy in their bubble, and the viewer is left quite perplexed. The idea is nice, but it crumbles between your fingers, feels overstuffed, unlike the first one, which was only about two cunning blokes playing each other. 70% (04/04/2020)

It's actually a fairy tale with a capitalist spirit. Oliver Stone continues to delve into intrigue and the possibilities of the stock market, but there's much more of a human aspect here, which is idealized to some extent, but contrasted with how people are corrupt and bad. It says something about us, and it says it quite well. (22/06/2017)