Young up-and-coming stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) gets the shot he’s been longing for after he uses inside information to recommend a stock tip to financial shark Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Although it’s clear that Gekko’s method of success often involves breaking the law, Fox finds it impossible to pass up the rewards--financial or otherwise--his newfound connections bring him.

CRITIQUE

Like many other great works of art from the 1980s--the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, Tim Burton’s Batman, Huey Lewis’s Sports--time has been less than kind to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. While not exactly a good movie to begin with, when it was originally released in December of 1987 it did benefit from a topicality that made it mildly interesting. It arrived a little more than a year after the infamous insider training scandal took down Ivan Boesky and his cronies, and only two months after the infamous Black Monday downturn.

At the time it was interesting to see an exposé/polemic on the evils of unchecked financial greed, but now the movie seems hopelessly dated and more than a little silly. Given all of the financial scandals that have occurred in the past twenty years, all of which make the events portrayed here seem like much ado about nothing, my current reaction to Wall Street can be summed up in one word: So?

This movie is often described as a morality tale (remember: Joe Eszterhas said the same thing about Showgirls), but it’s rather hard to accept a moral when the tale surrounding it is so preposterous. I’ve always found it difficult to buy into many of Fox’s actions. Given just how naïve he is (a naïveté that quite often borders on sheer stupidity), it strikes me as unlikely he’d be working at a prestigious brokerage farm; someone who makes this many dumb mistakes and errors in judgment is really only qualified to salt fries at a McDonald’s. He’s shrewd when the story requires him to be, too trusting for the same reason.

Greed may be good, but I doubt it’s this gullible. The scenes in which he conducts industrial espionage also don’t wash. I knew plenty of Business majors in college, yet I don’t know of a single one who took a course in how to disguise themselves as a janitor and then break into a rival firm and photocopy internal documents. There are several coincidences and contrivances in the final act, each more desperate than the last. And the final confrontation between Fox and Gekko is so broadly melodramatic and campy it looks like an outtake from Valley of the Dolls.

Whatever arguments the movie wants to make get lost in all of the silliness; this is another case of a ham-fisted Stone tossing subtlety, logic, and credibility out the window. It would be one thing if the movie were meant to be nothing than a melodrama/potboiler/thriller, but Stone expects us to take it seriously, and that’s a pill I can’t swallow.       

Tensions on the set reportedly ran high, especially when it came to costars Daryl Hannah and Sean Young. Hannah, playing an interior decorator who also whores herself out for Douglas (as ill-defined a characterization as you’re ever likely to see), turns in an absolutely awful performance.

This rankled with the other members of the cast, especially Young (who plays Gekko’s wife), who did her best to get Stone to fire Hannah and give her the part. When Stone didn’t, Young did her best to sabotage the shoot, which prompted the director to cut her part back to the bare minimum. (Sheen took revenge against Young in his own way: a widely-circulated story had him pinning a note to her back that made use of the English’s favorite four-letter slang for female genitalia).

All of this shows in the finished movie, with Young popping up just long enough to vamp it up like Bette David and then disappear, and Hannah’s every line reading making you wonder why she was even hired in the first place. These are two of the worst performances in a so-called great movie you’re ever likely to find.

Truthfully, Douglas’s Oscar-winning turn is the only lead performance that really holds up. Even though he was at the mercy of some truly awful dialogue and plot turns that almost turn Gekko into a campy, overblown menace, the duality of the performance makes it clear why the uninitiated would fall for his type of snake oil salesman.

Sheen looked too young for his role back in 1987 and he still looks too young; most of the time he comes across as a kid who has put on his daddy’s suit in hopes of looking like a grownup. (I’ll gladly jump on the bandwagon with those who think James Spader, who has a small role here, should instead have been cast as Bud Fox.) John C. McGinley stands out in a supporting role as one of Fox’s fellow brokers, talking a mile-a-minute and thereby making all of his tough-guy dialogue that much easier to take.

But the best performance belongs to Hal Holbrook, playing an old-guard broker quite obviously inspired by Stone’s stockbroker father (to whom the movie is dedicated). His character is around to do nothing more than deliver heavy-handed speeches about how things have changed since his day, but if there’s any actor who can take such didactic drivel and make it ring true, it’s Holbrook.

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1/1080p video (mislabeled as 2.35:1 in the specs) is easily the worst next-gen transfer to come off Fox’s production line (even worse than that of the Planet of the Apes remake). It’s soft, flat, and washed-out. Colors are dull throughout, black levels are very weak, and the grain structure is uneven. Some mild edge enhancement is noticeable, but the biggest flaw may be digital noise, which renders some shots practically unwatchable. Compare this to the transfer found on last year’s standard-def release and the two are virtually indistinguishable.

THE AUDIO

The DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio somehow manages to be even more of a disappointment than the video. Surround use is minimal (crowd noise in one scene, a flyover in another), and the low-end is so anemic it might as well not even be present. Stewart Copeland’s synth-heavy score sounds horrible. Dialogue is always intelligible, but it frequently exhibits a harsh, hollow, unnatural quality. Spanish and French Dolby Digital Mono tracks are also included. English, Spanish, French, Cantonese, and Korean subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by Oliver Stone is arguably the director’s weakest track to date. It starts off well enough, with a discussion of the evolution of the script and how his relationship with his father influenced the plot, but about halfway through Stone runs out of steam and his comments become very infrequent.

A collection of deleted scenes (25 minutes total), viewable only in one lump, is also included. Some of these are actually extended scenes (including a much longer version of the “Greed is good” scene), but there’s also some material from subplots that were dropped, including a bit with Penn Jillette as a client of Sheen’s and a hint of the excised affair between Fox and Gekko’s wife. Stone provides optional commentary for these scenes.

The documentary Money Never Sleeps: The Making of Wall Street (55 minutes) originally appeared on the first DVD release of the movie. Stone, Sheen, and Douglas appear throughout in interview segments, which are intercut with behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot.

Greed is Good (55 minutes) is a documentary that was created for last year's 20th Anniversary standard-def release. Stone, Sheen, and Douglas are again interviewed (they often simply repeat comments from the previous doc), and McGinley and Holbrook also appear. But most of the running time is devoted to interviews with brokers and financiers who were active during the ‘80s.

FINAL THOUGHT

The movie doesn’t hold up, the presentation is awful. I can’t recommend this release to even the more ardent fans of the movie or director Stone, much less anyone else.