The film is Oliver Stone's sequel from the hugely popular 1987 movie. The movie follows the Character of Gordon Gekko after he's released from prison and his attempts at reconciliation with his now grown daughter, played by Carey Muligan. She is coincidently engaged to an eager young stockbroker, played by Shia LeBouf. The whole story is set amidst the sub-prime crisis and revolves around the age old battle between love vs. money.
The plot is very simple, excluding all of the financial jargon thrown at you. It's really nothing that we haven't seen before. Unfortunately, the characters are very one dimensional and I found them highly unbelievable. Their actions just didn't add up with the motivations that should've been driving them. All of the protagonists were good natured, or at least ended up that way in the end. These characters weren't very flawed, even if they did make the wrong choices at times. They, especially Shia's characters, seemed to always have these naive good intentions in his heart. These sorts of idyllic characters don't exist and just weren't believable to me. Not to mention the fact that the daughter is surprised when her stockbroker boyfriend turns out to be just like her stockbroker dad -- who saw that coming?. The characters just weren't interesting enough or complex enough to keep me interested. The plot didn't help out either as it was very simply and predictable.
This was the slowest movie in the history of slow movies. I actually started counting the number of shots of just random buildings in the movie, and believe me it was easily in the double digits. For example, there is a part in the movie where Shia's character takes a helicopter ride. Now instead of showing us him getting into the helicopter and then arriving at the destination, Stone decided to show us him getting in the helicopter, then a 5 second shot of random buildings (again!), a 5 second shot of more buildings, a 5 second shot of a bridge, a 5 second shot of a valley, cut to Shia looking out the window of the helicopter, back to a 5 second shot of the helicopter clearing, then cut to Shia exiting the helicopter. So now, we've wasted precious time watching this extraordinarily long sequence of a helicopter ride that had no significance or impact on the plot whatsoever. So yes, I had a lot of issues with the editing of this movie. Quite possibly, all these unnecessary edits could've been removed giving us a shorter and more interesting movie? One will never know. There were some nice editing techniques used randomly throughout the movie, with split frame and motion edits etc. However, they didn't stay consistent throughout and were sort of just thrown in there in the beginning and middle of the movie. I always think that the editor should stick to a theme/style throughout the movie, in my opinion.
The actors did a fine job except I did notice that Michael Douglas can't seem to stand still when he talks? Shia and Carey gave acceptable performances. And it's actually interesting to note that in preparation for this role while working with actual stockbrokers, Shia invested $20,000.00 of his own money and actually ended up making over $400,000.00 from it. So this was definitely a good role choice for him.
The problems with this movie was the writing and editing. The story wasn't compelling and the editing made this movie run so extremely unnecessarily redudantly overbearingly s-l-o-w. The actors were fine but it really couldn't make up for the huge negatives created from the editing and writing. I somewhat enjoyed the banter back and forth about the financial crisis as seen in 2008 however professionals of that industry certainly would not speak in the lamymen's terms and analogies used throughout the movie, although I understand it was necessary to convey the ideas to a laymen audience. Unfortunately, I was very very disappointed in this movie and wouldn't recommend this to anyone other than I suppose die-hard fans of the first one. "If you stop telling lies about me, I'll stop telling the truth about you" -- Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
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