nan | 楠木

Oliver Stone’s original Wall Street, that seminal film about finance in the crazy 80s, remains the definitive main-stream Hollywood film on Wall Street, and gave aspiring investment bankers a real “role model” in Gordon Gecko. So it’s not surprising that 20 years later, when the world has gone through another financial crisis (and a much more severe one than the 87 stock crash), Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas pair up again to show Gordon Gecko’s second act. Unfortunately, the end result is a muddled effort, and in the words of my friend, a film that “never really took off”.

Part of the problem is the richness of material available. I myself have read two very interesting books on the 08 financial crisis, Too Big to Fail and The Big Short. These two books tell two sides of the same story – the former focuses on the deal-making and desperate negotiations during the eventful summer of 08; the latter focuses on the wise few who bet against the insanity of the market and won big, though philosophically they are also to blame for aggravating the situation. You can see glimpses of these books in Money Never Sleeps – especially two deal-brokering scenes at the New York Fed, which are essentially not-so-subtle references to the similar events around Lehman Brothers and later, AIG. But these snippets, while interesting, does not really tie together with the film’s main plot, and looks out of place – the film-makers are making explicit social commentary at the expense of the story, and the commentary is not really anything new. And then there’s the random clean-tech plot elements, which also are distracting and act as cheap plot devices (the central goal of Shia LaBeouf’s character, Moore, is to get $100MM funding for a nuclear fusion startup, and that’s what motivates the character).

What (almost) gets the film going is that Michael Douglas still commands the screen as Gordon Gecko. To some extent, Gecko twenty years later is even more fearsome than the powerful corporate raider he was in the 80s. He has lost most of what he had, and that makes him hungrier to claim it all back; and the years have just made him even more shrewd and cunning. But the allure of this character alone is not enough to rescue the whole film.

There are several references to the original film, starting from the same font used in the opening credits, to Charlie Sheen’s cameo (besides a few other original cast members’ cameos), to the same end-credit song. While there is nothing wrong per se with paying homage to the first film, to me they only felt as stark reminders of the difference in quality in the two films. The script is simply not at par, and often dissolves into disjoint populist diatribes at Wall Street greed; and the characters are really dumbed down – the one-dimensional good banker Zabel, who is Moore’s mentor and committed suicide when he couldn’t rescue his firm, is particularly unrealistic.

In sum – the plot is a botched product, and there’s little intelligent material in this unworthy sequel; Michael Douglas still shines, but the film only has some novelty value to fans of the original.

5/10

The Town is Ben Affleck’s gritty crime drama about an armed robbery gang from the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. While the story is generic and formulaic, the film is very well executed and generates real emotions about its characters.

Affleck is Doug MacRay, the semi-mastermind of a gang of four; Jeremy Renner is James Coughlin, Doug’s childhood friend and the head of the gang. The gang takes on tough armed robbery leads, generated by a local mob boss who is a florist by day. On the right side of the law is Jon Hamm, who plays FBI agent Adam Frawley.

The more I think of it, the more The Town feels like a Boston remake of Michael Mann’s LA crime drama, Heat. While Heat was probably unnecessarily long at almost 3 hours, that did give it the luxury of significant side plots to grow the range of characters, and not just Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s respective lead roles. The Town is much more economical, running at just over 2 hours; that however also translates into very one-dimensional characters. MacRay is the one that the audience is meant to care about, the one that we desperately want to see a happy ending for; Coughlin is the crazy one that will mess up everything; and Frawley is the resourceful and relentless cop that will pull all strings (including of course intimidating the women in MacRay’s life) to stop the gang.

My other minor complaint is regarding the somewhat happy ending, which felt like a small cop-out (spoiler warning). Obviously it is not easy to kill off the central character, but to give him a happily ever after – that’s not very satisfying either, since he hasn’t paid his share of dues to justice and conveys the wrong message. Maybe I’m just looking for too much meaning in a genre film.

All that aside, this is a high quality production. The action scenes look realistic and dramatic (again, think Heat remake, set in Boston), and the narrative is well-paced and generally full of tension. A very enjoyable 2 hours indeed.

8/10