Why make a sequel to Wall Street, you may ask? Wasn’t that a self-contained ode to 1980s greed? Well perhaps, but it also had a terrible ending. Charlie Sheen ran into court and you were eager to see what happened next. Where would he, Michael Douglas and Daryl Hannah end up? But we were never to find out. The camera panned away over Manhattan like Oliver Stone had got bored, flipping into a shorthand for ‘cases like this happen all the time’, or ‘just another brick in the wall’.
It simply wasn’t good enough. To add insult to injury, it didn’t work – the tone of the film doesn’t match up. This wasn’t American Psycho, not a detached portrait of a symptomatic personality. You can’t get metaphysical. It’s personal, a long back and forth between Charlie Sheen’s two polar paternal figures- the ruthless Gekko and his aggressively everyday dad. That Martin Sheen plays the dad makes it that bit more deliberate.
Fast forward 23 years, and Mr Stone returns to cap the story off, with Michael Douglas’s disgraced Gekko out of jail, having played Cassandra over the credit crunch – and there will be a cameo from Charlie Sheen. It feels like a cinematic bookend to a time gone by. Hopefully, it will be decent fun to watch, too.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 