Cashback: "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"

When Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko is released from prison in the opening moments of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, he has the following items returned to him: one gold watch, one gold ring, one gold money clip ("with no money in it", the processing officer sardonically observes), and one mobile phone the approximate size and weight of your average housebrick. Gekko, of course, was a monster sacred of the 1980s, when everything was big: the phones, the hair, the economy, even. One of the many disappointments of Oliver Stone's would-be timely sequel, then, is how it imposes on Gekko the stature of a mere supporting player, a visiting lecturer or warning from history: the character may once have embodied the evils of unchecked capitalism, the amoral pursuit of material goods, but as he himself rather wistfully admits in the new film, he's small-fry when set against the heightened, accelerated evils of corporate capitalism, and those driven to speculate on that which does not physically exist.

Like most sequels these days, Money Never Sleeps skews young and boring. The bulk of the screentime is given over to self-serious Transformers star Shia LaBeouf as a young energy trader (and initial recipient of the "one good banker" tag) who - as of October 2008, the period in which the drama unfolds - is romancing, and on the verge of settling down with, Gekko's estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan, underused). LaBeouf's Jake is driven to consult Gekko - touring the college circuit to promote his book "Is Greed Good?" - once it becomes apparent something is very rotten at the heart of his brokerage firm. He's picked this up from his mentor Louis Zabel (Frank Langhella), seen walking his dog in Central Park on the way to throwing himself before a subway train. "Are we going under?," Jake wonders. "You're asking the wrong question." "What is the right question?" "'Who isn't?'," is Zabel's response, a point Stone helpfully underlines by panning to a bubble making its way up over the city's skyline. Geddit?

The presence of Josh Brolin as the nominal villain of the piece - the Gekko 2.0 - proposes Money Never Sleeps as of a topical piece with W., Stone's grabby Dubya biopic that satisfied as neither hagiography nor satire. The angry leftist firebrand Stone of old would have surely gone for the throats of these subjects, as did his self-scripted Salvador way back when, fuelling the audience's sense of righteous indignation. Now, though, he seems happy to subcontract these projects out to other writers (presumably Stone himself was busy meeting Latin American leaders for that South of the Border documentary), and feels increasingly obliged to explain the times we're living through, either because, as a curious sort of fellow, he wants to know how these events came to pass, or - more likely, on this evidence - because he believes we, the public, ought to know, and might be incapable of doing the legwork for ourselves.

Either way, he's mellowed: though the director grants himself a regrettable cameo as an investor LaBeouf visits on his travels, Stone's real point of identification appears to lie with the newly marginalised Gekko - his most enduring creation, more so than Costner's earnestly dull prosecutor in JFK or the outlaws Micky and Mallory in Natural Born Killers - hoping that audiences will turn to him to provide answers, much as Jake does to Gekko's apparently rehabilitated master of the universe. That's as maybe, yet - as in W. - all this backstory and explication isn't in itself especially cinematic: I found my own interest in Money Never Sleeps peaked early, and thereafter began steadily to tail off. The talk of leverage and credit-default swaps (jargon only a seasoned number-cruncher could possibly find thrilling); the endless shots of faces reflected in monitors; the wall-to-wall PowerPoint presentations - all of this is very tedious, and Stone has to resort to putting his characters in the back of a speeding cab, or recycling composer Craig Armstrong's old Plunkett and Macleane cues to inject any kind of urgency into proceedings.

The shift of dramatic emphasis - onto the shoulders of a kid (as LaBeouf still resembles) invited to sit at the grown-ups' trough, only to find himself out of his depth - is a downward one, giving the movie the feel of a teenpic with ideas above its station: The Skulls in a resized tuxedo, perhaps. With its glamorous penthouses, fast cars and Slavic hookers ("This is Olga from the Ukraine"), its cameos from Warren Buffett and Graydon Carter, its Byrne-Eno songs, Money Never Sleeps is at least a non-event de luxe, resembling a Fortune 500 company's in-house production (studio Fox is a News International offshoot, after all), or a souvenir DVD to be given away on the front cover of Forbes magazine - a nice, reassuring memento for our bankers to laugh about once their next round of bonuses come through. This hasn't stopped MNS from securing its director his best U.S. opening-weekend figures to date - and that's symptomatic of the moral failings of Stone's own double-dip: for all the film seeks to reverse the syntax or add supplementary question marks, it turns out that, for some folk, greed really is good.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is on nationwide release.