Another Review of Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps

I wanted to follow up on the earlier review of the sequel to Wall Street.  For me, the original is a special movie, along with OPM being one of the more influential cinematic reasons why I became a corporate and securities lawyer.  So the sequel I believe is a proper topic for this blog.

As Prof. Colesanti pointed out, in the original movie the regulators where the 800 lb gorilla that wasn't on screen, but there precense was felt.  They make their enterance much like Orson Welles in the Third Man late in the film.  And correctly so, in this film at best the regulators are impotent to stop the coming financial crisis.

But I think this is where Oliver Stone gets it wrong.  Like so many others, Oliver Stone suggests that the 2008 financial crisis on which the movie was loosely based was caused by the lack of regulation.  But Stone fails to bring up any reason why the housing bubble existed in the first place - whether you believe it to be the requirements that banks had to lend to subprime borrowers, that housing was the only viable investment after the internet bubble burst, etc.  And then the linkage between the housing market and what the investment banking houses were doing is missing an adequate explantation in the film.  Lastly, Stone makes the underlying assumption that making money was bad.  So the investment banks are hedged. It's a fact of life that some investors take both sides of the market.  Stone's treatment of the subject was a little juvenille.

For the rest of the movie, the acting is less than stellar.  The plot, predictible and thin for an Oliver Stone film.  Charlie Sheen's cameo was wasted.  Even the use of bubbles as a visual element in the film is hackneyed.  The best aspect of the movie was the incidental music.

jmm