On the couch

MICHAEL Douglas still has it. Whatever ‘it’ is he’s got it by the bucketload. In spades. He’s got so much ‘it’ that my 16-year-old daughter, who only knows him as the creepy old guy who hangs around with Catherine Zeta Jones, commented that he “must have been really popular when he was younger” less than an hour into the film.

Whatever way you want to describe it, he’s still brimming over with it and a good thing too, because without it Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps would be a considerably tougher and preachier pill to swallow.
Lining out alongside two of the brightest young things of cinema over the last year or three, Douglas returns as Gordon Gekko, the villain and star of Oliver Stone’s 1987 original, a humbler and apparently reborn figure. After eight years in the slammer and another seven in the financial wilderness, the one time lion of Wall Street is now more a wounded moggy. Divorced and mourning the suicide of his son, his company is shunned by both former financial partners and, more importantly, his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan).
The flick catches up with Gekko in 2008, just before the wheels came off the world’s financial wagon, when all but a few knew, or believed, that things would do anything other than continue to get better.
Now an author and public speaker working the college circuit and decrying the madness of the market and rolling back on his original mantra of “Greed is good”, the one-time coverboy for capitalist piggery seems to have turned over a newer, fluffier leaf.
Of course, this is just background noise in the film as the main story is actually focused on Shia LaBeouf’s hungry young Turk, Jake Moore, an up-and-comer in Keller Zable Investments (KZI), a venerable banking institution that in no way resembles real American bank Bear Stearns.
Moore’s interest in green energy – cold fusion particularly – mark him as being a good guy right out of the gate and his slightly constipated, Shatner-esque affectation of grief at the death of his mentor, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) tells the audience early that he is a man to be trusted amongst all these other money mad types. He also just happens to be engaged to Gekko’s estranged daughter.
So on a background of the beginning of the world banking crisis, Moore begins a one-man campaign of revenge against his new boss, Bretton James (Josh Brolin), whom he suspects of masterminding the rumours that saw KZI destabilised and left ripe for takeover by James’ bank, Churchill Schwartze.
When not busying himself with singlehandedly bringing an international bank down from the inside, Jake is also trying to get his fiancée to kiss and make up with her dear old dad in exchange for his help in getting revenge.
Just like the original, Wall Street 2’s story layers double-cross on top of triple-cross (does that make them quintuple crosses?). They lack any real punch though because, while Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox was slightly sleazy and believably torn between doing the right thing and the possible riches a life as Gekko’s protégé could promise, LaBeouf is established early on as a morally-centred sort, unlikely to be troubled by the lure of the dark side.
This takes a lot of the punch out of the film although it’s still interesting to see some of the drier aspects of the world’s financial crisis laid out in an easily comprehensible manner. The story’s a bit of craic too, although errs on the side of preachiness from time to time and is well served by its cast; Josh Brolin being enjoyably hateable as Bretton James.
Most of all though it’s fantastic to watch Douglas prowl around the screen again. While the story lets you know that Gekko’s reputation has taken a kicking – people don’t remember his name, he can’t afford to go to a fancy dinner – you never doubt that he’s got something up his sleeve. Whether it’s good or bad is a whole other matter, but even if the rest of the film was simply sticks of celery in pinstrip suits being filmed slowly falling out of a trolley, it would still be worth watching just for his performance. It’s just a shame there wasn’t more of him in it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again
– what was Tom Cruise thinking?
Barely 10 minutes into Knight and Day, I was already underwhelmed. Nothing about the opening of James Mangold’s action-comedy spy flick is particularly bad. The stars, Cruise and Cameron Diaz, meet in an airport before moving quickly to a knife fight in the airplane cabin. It’s just that it’s all so run-of-the-mill stuff.
Take the first 10 minutes of Salt by comparison – massive explosions, wall climbing and Angelina Jolie hopping off bridges onto moving trucks – and you really have to wonder why on earth he jumped ship from one project to the other.
From its mid-air rumble onwards, Knight and Day never really slows down long enough for many of the dumber or crazier plot holes to become apparent or at least not blindingly so. Hooking up with Diaz for reasons never quite made clear, Roy Miller (Cruise) is either a spy on the run accused of a massacre he didn’t commit or an unhinged agent with blood on his hands trying to evade capture.
Everything works exactly as you’d expect it to – Diaz is koooky and charming and does a good job of not just being ‘the girl’. Cruise is a good action lead and gives good crazy – imagine if Looney Toons did a version of Vincent from Collateral and you’re in the right ballpark for Miller.
It all works acceptably well and the two stars have a good chemistry but nothing about Knight and Day will set pulses racing and should you want to make a cuppa while you’re watching it, not pausing the film won’t make much difference to your appreciation of it. Uninspiring stuff.