David O'ConnellWall Street: Money Never Sleeps
November 21st 2011 05:22
This much is certain: Oliver Stone may never sleep again. A string of failed projects has led to a career nadir. Everything about this superfluous sequel carries about it the air of an exorcism: a once heavyweight director whose meaningful visions have been blunted by time and degraded ambition, hoping to recapture the zeitgeist through an infamous arch villain of morality who allowed golden plaudits to be delivered to his ears long ago. Deeply flawed, but even more offensively, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) is dull and painfully conventional. Is it an ode to venality that transcends the decades? Or the hope of a reformed man who doesn’t want to be buried in a coffin of banknotes without ever having spared a humane thought for his only daughter? The lightweight emotional sparring is empty, the drama flat, inert and jargon-riddled. In Michael Douglas we see a man looking jaded like an impression of Gekko’s ghost reluctantly returning from beyond the swamp of primordial ooze simply to uphold some nefarious contractual obligation and prevent his heirs from utter destitution. The allure of appearing in an 'Oliver Stone Film' was clearly too attractive for Carey Mulligan to bypass. As Gekko’s daughter Winnie she’s like flotsam, meekly floating in and out of scenes, to cry, to bemoan in indignation, to denounce her father for his all-encompassing culpability. Is there a more absurd actor in modern cinema than Shia LeBeouf? Will he ever play a character who isn’t an annoying, slick, fast-talking little shit of a wannabe ruler of the world? Then there’s poor Josh Brolin soullessly stalking the sidelines as Evil Incarnate, the Gekko throwback upon whose wolfish leer the blood of the fiscally-depleted can almost be glimpsed. Everything about this film stinks to high heaven, from Stone’s sad concessions to modernity (split screens; a graphic-enhanced sequence to illustrate a scientific process; the flickering projection of LeBeouf’s dead mentor on a toilet wall), to the awful David Byrne songs, the spineless backflip resolution and the happily ever after/life’s-just-one-big-par ty-for-the-wealthy phoniness of the end credits sequence. Truly awful stuff from a director responsible for some of my favourite films, like Talk Radio (1988) and U-Turn (1997).
| 53 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
