Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is out on video this week. Saw it, never reviewed, honestly how much energy does one want to spend on it? Michael Douglas is good, but if he gets an Academy Award nomination this year it should be for the underseen Solitary Man, where he gives one of his very best performances. To be sure, he is surrounded in WSMNS by lots of good acting from the likes of Josh Brolin and Frank Langella and Shia LaBeouf and Susan Sarandon, who's also in Solitary Man. From a dinner scene in the gorgeous interior of Shun Lee West to a fundraiser at the Metropolitan Museum the movie has a genuinely right Wall Street/NYC feel to it. But it doesn't have the same quality of screenplay as the first movie. It's a story about whether a leopard can change its spots, and a tad prosaic and unsurprising in ticking off the beats, some of which require the characters to do things that just seem a little bit off. And so even though it has Wall Street characters doing Wall Street things, it isn't a movie for it's time the way the first one was. Too busy watching the leopards and their spots to notice the sharks and the tigers in the financial world. Do me a favor, if you're thinking of getting this on video, take a look at Solitary Man instead which is available now on DVD and on demand. I confess WSMNS is the more entertaining in some ways because of it's gloss and sheen and likeability but Solitary Man has Douglas and Sarandon and DeVito and Jesse Eisenberg and is grittier without being medicinal. WSMNS is empty calories.