MOVIE REVIEWS: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Money may never sleep, but that may not be the case when it comes to the audience watching Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, several critics suggest. “Greed is boring,” writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle in his review. “Strange thing about this movie: The sky is falling, empires are crumbling, venerable financial monoliths are vanishing in a matter of hours, and yet none of it feels especially dramatic.” Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal, while acknowledging that the story “holds your attention,” observes that “it’s a dramatic bubble about a financial bubble” that “unfolds much too slowly to capture the frenzy of the September 2008 meltdown.” Likewise Kyle Smith in the New York Post comments that writer-director Oliver Stone “can’t quite shape the 2008 meltdown into a movie. We should be outraged about the crisis because … it led to the suicides of top banking officials? Sorry, incorrect.” Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel says that the film starts off well enough, “And then the script lets everybody down, the cliches pile up like junk bonds.” Most critics do credit the performance of Michael Douglas for giving the movie its saving grace. “No one is better than Douglas at slipping into the skin of a human snake,” writes Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, while giving the film a mostly negative review, nevertheless observes, “Douglas is always fun to watch, and he brings considerable brio to the film.” And A.O. Scott in the New York Times says that Douglas inhabits his role “with leonine bombast and reptilian cunning.”

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