Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps Script Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: October 11th, 2009

The recent stock market crash has director Oliver Stone making a follow-up to the 1987 classic Wall Street with hopes of yet another socially relevant narrative.  Michael Douglas is reprising his Oscar-winning role and is joined by Hollywood’s go-to twenty-something Shia LaBeouf.  With production underway, I thought we’d take a spoilerific look at the screenplay by Allan Loeb (21) dated February 2009.

The sequel’s subtitle, Money Never Sleeps, comes from a line in the original, but doesn’t really bear any significance in Wall Street 2 other than as a recognizable motto.

The script starts in 2002 as Gordon Gekko (Douglas) emerges from prison after serving 14 years for insider trading.  No family or expensive town car are there to pick him up.  In the the six years since his release, Gekko makes a living publishing best-sellers about the market and headlining doom-and-gloom speaking engagements where he warns of an impending global meltdown.

In a recent interview, Stone remarked on the irony of a fictional criminal like Gekko being idolized by his flesh and blood-thirsty counterparts in the business.  It’s at one of these college speeches Stone will show the Street’s fascination with the character.  The infamous “greed is good” quote from the original has become the mantra of modern Wall Street brokers and cutthroat salesmen, but Gekko doesn’t even remember it and acknowledges his line by saying, “it sounds like something I would say in the Eighties.”

He’s not the slicked-back embodiment of greed you might remember either.  Gekko is a neutered version of his uncaring former self, morally reformed and more or less a supporting role.  He’s there to tie a revenge story together with a family drama subplot until around the last five pages.

His daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) hasn’t spoken to Gordon in years and he’s not above manipulating her boyfriend, Jacob (LaBeouf), to reconnect with his remaining family.  (Her brother Rudy, portrayed as a silver-spoon baby in the original, died of an overdose.)  That’s the extent of the thin father-daughter tension that (over)plays out in sporadic, telegraphed scenes.

The rest of the story is told along a timeline visualized as the falling market of 2008, just months before an economic collapse still felt today.  Jacob is a mid-level broker at a firm established by his mentor, Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella).  Only the firm is in trouble, a sinking ship with unmanageable debt still handing out bonuses.  Sound familiar?  A rumor started by a hedge fund manager finishes off the company and causes Zabel to commit suicide.

Bent on vengeance, Jacob captures the attention of this nefarious “hedgehog” named Bretton James (Josh Brolin) by sharing Gekko’s inside information about a specific stock all over town.  The price plummets and James loses millions.  Instead of being angry, James is impressed by Jacob’s loyalty and hires him, which Jacob and Gekko see as an opportunity to bring him down from the inside.

The decadence of over-spending is evident almost immediately.  Like the first, the “haves” and “have nots” are separated by flashy penthouses, private jets, expensive piano recitals, and suggestive art pieces.  Bretton says, “only the obsessive compulsive or insecure egotistical collect.”  He means Gekko!  Isn’t that clever?

The revenge plot is redundant, borrowing from the original’s climax and duplicating Jacob’s initial counterattack.  Other than a random motorcycle race, there’s rarely a grand moment as Jacob hooks Bretton for a ride down the falling market.

In fact, the script doesn’t contain any quotable lines or memorable exchanges.  Instead it’s an arrangement of thinly-veiled market references and– through the benefit of hindsight – blunt foreshadowing to the financial crisis.  A roaring 20’s party?  Subtle.

The jargon of the original provided a realistic backdrop for a modern morality story.  Now the Street slang is used for cutesy inside jokes like trading photographs “on margin” or a frat of Wall Street types using stock symbols to label women in a swanky bar.  They talk as traders might, but don’t seem concerned with audience lost in the lingo.

To be fair, the script has obviously gone through a few revisions.  The character of Jacob’s mother has been added for Susan Sarandon and characters have been renamed in the process.  Charlie Sheen has also been confirmed in a cameo as Bud Fox, now the CEO of Blue Star Airlines.  But without a significant rewrite this is just another pointless sequel.  Judging purely from the script, this is a rushed production to send a timely message or cash in on the financial crisis, not a passion project for Stone and company.