Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) can take some responsibility for our recent economic debacle, but the director can't be blamed for not knowing that his ironic "Greed is good" would be taken seriously as a motto by a generation of ruthless buccaneers. His sequel has no comparable lines.
Twenty-three years after getting busted in the original, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) leaves prison to find a world of venality that makes his own misdeeds look like a traffic violation. Forgotten by most and alienated from his daughter (Carey Mulligan), he takes on a new acolyte (Shia LaBeouf) and does rather nicely for himself.
Stone jazzes up the dry proceedings with fancy filmic footwork, but even he is no match for derivatives. The nuts and bolts of the '80s disaster were intentionally abstract and comprehensible only to a few, and this sort of thing doesn't produce sexy cinema, only misery for millions.
