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“Robin Hood” certainly didn’t take Cannes by storm – and now, after its first couple of screenings, it’s safe to say that neither has the festival’s other big-studio Hollywood production, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”
While Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 1987 drama has drawn quite a few respectful early reviews, there's not been much enthusiasm.
Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman delivered about as positive a summary as you’ll find when he wrote, “The movie is no classic, but it’s vibrantly acted and entertainingly overstuffed, a shrewd and complex finance melodrama that pulses along with hardboiled verve.”
The Hollywood trades, meanwhile, were both relatively positive. Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “One senses a fully engaged filmmaker at the helm, driving the movie at a lightning pace as if in a hurry to get to the next scene or next aphorism that further illuminates this dark world.”
At Variety, Justin Chang called the film a “shrewdly opportunistic, glibly entertaining sequel, which offers another surface-skimming peek inside the power corridors of global finance, this time during the 2008 economic crisis.”
Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere almost liked it more than that – but in the end, thanks to an event revealed in his review (spoiler alert), the movie lost him: “’Wall Street 2’ … is an intelligent, briskly paced, rat-a-tat financial tale that moves along nicely for the first 75% to 80% of its running time -- not brilliantly but sufficiently, offering a more-or-less decent ride. And then it blows itself up during the last 25 minutes or so.”
Todd McCarthy also had a problem with ending, which he called “outrageously false.” “[T]he script feels like a pasted-together hodgepodge of elements that co-exist without credibly blending together,” he wrote at indieWIRE, “topped by a climax that feels particularly hokey in its effort to leave audiences comfortable rather than disturbed by what they’ve just seen.”
“’Wall Street’ conceals its trite dialogue beneath a cacophony of rumbling subways and shouting TV nudniks, not to mention a veritable tickertape parade of jargon,” added J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, while Peter Bradshow at the Guardian was similarly cynical, if not quite as pointed:
“Twenty-three years on, Oliver Stone has given us the sequel to the most unsubtle father-son parable in cinema history, theoretically rebooted for our new post-crash era, but in actuality just as saucer-eyed and uncritically celebratory about it all as ever.”
His fellow Brit, the Times’ Kate Muir, focused on the performances from Michael Douglas, Carey Mulligan and Shia LaBeouf: “Beneath the information overload, however, there are some great performances and Douglas is still terrific … Mulligan is a natural, down-to-earth Winnie … LaBeouf does a steady job, but there is just something that says “airline attendant” to me about him.”
