Cannes: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Gordon Gekko comes out of jail a disappointingly reformed character.

From left, Oliver Stone, Carey Mulligan, Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf in holiday mood in Cannes, where their film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was screened at the 63rd international film festivShow more

Gordon Gekko is back; and this time he's softer, more sensitive and, alas, far more boring and predictable. Back in his 1980s heyday Michael Douglas tore up the screen with slogans like "Greed is good", "Lunch is for wimps" and "Money never sleeps" as he trained Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox in banking shenanigans.

Here, Gekko is released from jail in 2001. This makes little narrative sense, as Gekko would not have received such a long sentence for the insider trading that was the centrepiece of Wall Street. Stone attempts to solve the problem with a number of expositional statements about lengthy appeals and further charges, but in the end the numbers simply don't add up. Jokes such as Gekko getting back his enormous 1980s mobile phone on leaving prison simply draw attention to the fact that the timeframe doesn't work.

However, with a September 11 link made, the action jumps forward seven years to 2008, a time when several banks found themselves undone by their exposure to sub-prime mortgages, leading to the global financial meltdown. References to the collapses of real banks are barely concealed behind fake names, and the director has much fun making the banks' corporate heads look like gangsters. For the most part, Stone fails to tie in a story about Gekko trying to reconnect with his daughter (Carey Mulligan) against the backdrop of the banking crisis.

She is underwritten, but that's no surprise as the depiction of female characters has always been the director's Achilles' heel. The casting of Shia LaBeouf as the young buck Jacob Moore, who is trying to make his mark in the financial world, is remarkable, mostly because the Transformers star is an actor who makes Charlie Sheen look like Laurence Olivier. The best action in the movie comes before Moore tries in vain to organise a détente between father and daughter in an attempt to win Gekko's favour.

Stone has always been a director who works best when weaving real life incident with grandstand drama. When recreating the banking turmoil of 2008 the director is in his element. He's helped considerably by Frank Langella's turn as Lewis Zabel, the head of the first bank to fail in the 2008 crisis. Zabel is clearly from the old school of banking and is as confused by the activities of modern financiers as the rest of us.

But Stone sadly seems to have misunderstood what people liked about his most famous character. Despite its overriding message that greed is definitely not good, the original film is not remembered with affection because of Gekko's downfall, but because of his questionable exploits ahead of it. Part of the attraction of Gekko was his ability to provide quotable dialogue but attempts to recapture that facility just seem clunky in the sequel. And when Gekko starts to get sentimental it's time to withdraw all interest in this legendary character.