The Wall Street Money Never Sleep had a great premise at the beginning - return of great characters from the original and very interesting subject matter (worst financial and economical crisis since the World War II). While the movie succeeds in taking us through the financial crisis as it gradually unfolded, it is constantly dragged down by way too many plot points, but mainly the hardly believable revenge and very slow paced love story subplots.
Let's get one thing clear at the beginning first. It is an immensely difficult task for the writers to portray the financial crisis into a movie for general masses, while explaining the workings of the crisis, not bogging down the viewers with too much financial jargon and at the same time keep the movie entertaining. This is the part that you can see the makers have made their homework and is something to be appreciated about the movie, such as the Bear Sterns inspired collapse of Keller Zabel.
My biggest problem with the movie is that the character with the most screen time, Jacob Moore, is not a believable character. It might be due to casting Shia LeBouf, who for one looks too young and too soft to be earning $1.5m bonuses and living in a $6m apartment. Second, he is a "prop trader," which means that his job is to constantly trade stocks on his company's account. Yet, we see him trying to raise $100m for a renewable energy source, which isn't the job of prop traders. Even he is pitching the idea to Chinese investors, which is nonsense, since he would have had nothing to say about the company unless he was an equity analyst responsible for the energy sector. This brings the obvious question, why was he so interested in the little fusion plant project? His job is to make money not save the world.
And than there are the inconsistencies and plot holes: At the beginning of the movie Jacob invests $1m from his bonus on 50% margin into his firm Keller Zabel and keeps his position even as the stock is plummeting putting him into sizeable amount of debt (film hinted $0.5 mil). Now, first firms usually prohibit employees on speculating on their own stock due to the possibility of having insider information and second if Jacob was such an excellent prop trader he wouldn't have touched the stock if there were rumors of its impending collapse. This alone is hardly believable and our intelligence is assaulted again when the film somehow forgets his debt (before he even admits the debt when proposing to his girlfriend), when he writes his mom a check for $200,000 without a second thought.
Jacob spreads rumors about an African oil rig being nationalized in which Bretton's company has a big stake, which ended up costing the company millions. And Gekko ends up explaining to Jacob that it was illegal because he pushed other people to make traders based on false information, so Jacob realizes that the two are alike. How can a Wall Street rainmaker such as Jacob not realize that he manipulated the markets, which is illegal?
Other problems: Gekko's London hedge fund growing from $100 mil to $1.1 bil during Winney's pregnancy? At one point, we saw workers dismantling the fusion plant, would it have been too little too late to give the $100m to an empty factory site?
To conclude, this is a revenge and redemption movie with Wall Street and market crash as a backdrop. If they had cut down the crying-girl scenes, to improve pacing, maybe it could have turned out better. This way, it's just plain bad.
Let's get one thing clear at the beginning first. It is an immensely difficult task for the writers to portray the financial crisis into a movie for general masses, while explaining the workings of the crisis, not bogging down the viewers with too much financial jargon and at the same time keep the movie entertaining. This is the part that you can see the makers have made their homework and is something to be appreciated about the movie, such as the Bear Sterns inspired collapse of Keller Zabel.
My biggest problem with the movie is that the character with the most screen time, Jacob Moore, is not a believable character. It might be due to casting Shia LeBouf, who for one looks too young and too soft to be earning $1.5m bonuses and living in a $6m apartment. Second, he is a "prop trader," which means that his job is to constantly trade stocks on his company's account. Yet, we see him trying to raise $100m for a renewable energy source, which isn't the job of prop traders. Even he is pitching the idea to Chinese investors, which is nonsense, since he would have had nothing to say about the company unless he was an equity analyst responsible for the energy sector. This brings the obvious question, why was he so interested in the little fusion plant project? His job is to make money not save the world.
And than there are the inconsistencies and plot holes: At the beginning of the movie Jacob invests $1m from his bonus on 50% margin into his firm Keller Zabel and keeps his position even as the stock is plummeting putting him into sizeable amount of debt (film hinted $0.5 mil). Now, first firms usually prohibit employees on speculating on their own stock due to the possibility of having insider information and second if Jacob was such an excellent prop trader he wouldn't have touched the stock if there were rumors of its impending collapse. This alone is hardly believable and our intelligence is assaulted again when the film somehow forgets his debt (before he even admits the debt when proposing to his girlfriend), when he writes his mom a check for $200,000 without a second thought.
Jacob spreads rumors about an African oil rig being nationalized in which Bretton's company has a big stake, which ended up costing the company millions. And Gekko ends up explaining to Jacob that it was illegal because he pushed other people to make traders based on false information, so Jacob realizes that the two are alike. How can a Wall Street rainmaker such as Jacob not realize that he manipulated the markets, which is illegal?
Other problems: Gekko's London hedge fund growing from $100 mil to $1.1 bil during Winney's pregnancy? At one point, we saw workers dismantling the fusion plant, would it have been too little too late to give the $100m to an empty factory site?
To conclude, this is a revenge and redemption movie with Wall Street and market crash as a backdrop. If they had cut down the crying-girl scenes, to improve pacing, maybe it could have turned out better. This way, it's just plain bad.