I never saw the original Wall Street so I can't say if this is a decent sequel. I can tell you it's boring and the character motivations make no sense to me.Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is an up and coming analyst at a prestigious Wall Street firm with a passion for alternative energy, specifically a new fusion reactor powered by sea water. Things seem to be looking good, until his mentor (Frank Langella) is pressured into suicide by a rival company. Coincidentally, around this same time, his girlfriend's (Carey Mulligan) father, Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas), gets out of prison and goes on a book tour. Jake starts bargaining, trading moments and chances for Gecko to reconcile with the daughter who hates him in exchange for advice on how to destroy the man who killed his mentor (Josh Brolin). But Gecko is not solely motivated by a desire for atonement and Jake must look past his own selfish inclinations to counter a master manipulator.
Honestly, this was a lot of posturing and chest-thumping among a group of narcissists. I have no idea why Mulligan's character stayed in the relationship with a selfish asshole who embodied all the traits she hated in her father, but I've seen that happen in real life so I was willing to let it go. All of the double-dealing and ego-stroking that happens among these financiers with zero regard for how their actions affected millions of people is also baffling to me, but again, I lived through the 2008 recession and the bailouts and the lack of accountability. This doesn't make the film interesting, cathartic, or informative to watch. It's just chronicling what happened.
Even the cutesy, saccharine ending didn't dissuade me from hating every single character. No one learned anything from their mistakes and the characters ended exactly where they began. It's a slick film, with a lot of handsome flourishes by director Oliver Stone and an incredible cast of actors, but I would never watch it again.
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