14 DAY TRIAL // This year’s Cannes Film Festival marked the premiere (out of competition) of two of the most anticipated movies of this year: Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” and Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” or, simply put, “Wall Street 2,” the sequel to the 1987 classic. The latter screened the other day and, from what The Hollywood Reporter is saying, it’s a certified winner.
When the first trailer for the film dropped at the beginning of the year, many fans felt disappointed in it as it did not seem to promise the brilliant ride they’d been expecting for over two decades. Appearances can be deceiving, THR says now in its review of the film, as the sequel more than lives up to the hype, while also managing the almost unthinkable feat of bringing something new to the table. The world portrayed in “Money Never Sleeps” is no longer exotic, but cynic and dark. Gordon Gekko fits just perfectly in it.
“Stone returns to this world in ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,’ but there’s nothing exotic about it anymore. It’s featured on the nightly news in every unemployment statistic and freshly announced corporate downsizing. The bank bailout debate still rages, and arrogant banking kingpins looks less like anti-heroes than out-and-out villains. So Stone and his savvy writers, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, have crafted a tale that takes advantage of viewer’s newfound knowledge and cynicism. At its heart is a pair of good young people wanting to put money into green energy while all around them there revolves, like an evil planetary system, gravitational forces that know only unregulated (in every sense of the word) chicanery,” THR writes.
Aside from the very balanced script, “Wall Street 2” also benefits from pretty solid acting performances. “Can you win two Oscars playing the same role? An actor rarely gets the opportunity to revive a breakthrough role in a way that allows him to rethink the character in terms of changes time has wrought and to reflect on where fatal flaws once lay. Douglas does this brilliantly. […] LaBeouf nicely balances his character’s idealism with cold-eyed pragmatism. He gets the earnestness but also the steely determination. Mulligan and Brolin deliver extremely strong supporting roles with attention-grabbing characters that could star in other movies,” the same movie-oriented publication says of the film.
What with the incredibly (and almost surprisingly) favorable review, fans will still have to wait for a while longer for “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” The film arrives in US theaters in September this year, so make sure you keep an eye on this space until then for more details on it.