Has Oliver Stone gone soft on ‘Wall Street’?
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The early reviews are in from Cannes on Oliver Stone’s upcoming ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,’ which will hit theaters here in September. And to hear Todd McCarthy tell it, America’s most notorious left-wing filmmaker and critic of Republican greed and excess has gone soft on financial chicanery, so soft that you could imagine the film earning rave reviews from CNBC’s Jim Cramer and all the other zealous tub-thumpers for anything-goes stock market wheeling and dealing.
In one of his first reviews writing for his Deep Focus blog at Indiewire after being abruptly fired earlier this spring by Variety, McCarthy shows that his writing hasn’t lost any of its zip. Here’s his condensed take:
The new film initially takes good and opportunistic advantage of contemporary financial woes to detail the malfeasance of bankers and traders. But the script feels like a pasted-together hodgepodge of elements that co-exist without credibly blending together, topped by a climax that feels particularly hokey in its effort to leave audiences comfortable rather than disturbed by what they’ve just seen. It’s surprising for Oliver Stone to propagate an air of complacency about the financial state of things, but that’s the effect of the outrageously false feel-good ending. In the end, the picture has little new or insightful to say about business and investment tomfoolery, much less about the future, beyond what is contained in the characters’ innumerable platitudes.
For me, an even bigger shocker is that Stone, who hasn’t had a big box-office hit in more than a decade, seems to have been forced to include what seems like the now-obligatory 20th Century Fox motorcycle race in the middle of the film to provide some muscular jolts for the film’s trailer (there’s also one in Fox’s upcoming ‘Knight and Day’ thriller). As McCarthy puts it: ‘It’s hard to believe Stone would stoop to arbitrarily making [film co-stars Shia LeBeouf and James Brolin’s] characters motorcycle racers just for the sake of a silly action sequence ... but there it is.’
Justin Chang, who has succeeded McCarthy as Variety’s principal critic, is somewhat less harsh in his assessment, saying that Stone seems more at ease as a filmmaker than he’s been in years, handling the actors well and moving his camera ‘assuredly from high-powered charity banquets to the Federal Reserve Board’s inner chambers to de rigueur shots of the trading-room floor.’ But even Chang sounds underwhelmed by the film’s light-weight tone:
‘Has Gordon Gekko gone soft? The answer is, sort of -- a development that takes some of the bite out of Oliver Stone’s shrewdly opportunistic, glibly entertaining sequel, which offers another surface-skimming peek inside the power corridors of global finance.’
The most intriguing question still remains. Does a sequel, coming 23 years after the original film, get any bounce from the fact that its Michael Douglas-played Gekko character ended up being an unusually resonant mythic figure in popular culture? Or will moviegoers stay away in droves, believing that any movie about the evil titans of Wall Street is sure to be too much of a downer, even with a sequel good-luck charm like LaBeouf on board, riding a motorcycle to boot?