In cinema history the characters of Fast Eddie Felson and Gordon Gekko have had a similar path. Both Paul Newman and Michael Douglas got to reprise their characters in a real time period on the screen, roughly the same quarter century for both. Gekko had the additional good fortune of having his character helmed on the screen the second time by the man that created him, Oliver Stone.

Gordon Gekko certainly had a more public existence than the small time pool hustler who reached for the big time only to get flattened by powers that be. Michael Douglas won his Oscar for Gekko in the original Wall Street and he's improved and refined his character here.

The Wall Street Pirate of the Reagan Era has gone to prison for his crimes and is now a best selling author, but also someone not quite sure of his next move. Douglas is a sadder and wiser man it seems, he's lost a wife and son and his daughter is estranged from him. Daughter Carey Mulligan is serious with a young stockbroker, Shia LaBoeuf oddly enough though.

LaBoeuf has a mission kind of thrust upon him. In an obvious reference to Lehman Brothers, the long standing brokerage firm headed by family patriarch Frank Langella has collapsed. Langella was his mentor and LaBoeuf is thinking that this was a set up and he wants payback. Who better to help than Michael Douglas who knows the Street like no other. But as it turns out Douglas has his own history with the man who engineered the downfall Josh Brolin and Douglas has his own agenda.

Douglas is right back at the top of his game in his career role and LaBoeuf and Mulligan make an attractive pair of young lovers. However I would not be surprised if Susan Sarondon does get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as Shia's mother. She was once a hospital nurse, but she gets into the real estate game with the inflated housing market and gets in way over her head. She too has taken up the Gekko Gospel of Greed Is Good and takes a tumble for her efforts.

Oliver Stone has done what some consider impossible and made a successful sequel to a classic film with Money Never Sleeps. And in real time as well.

As far as modern Hollywood films go, WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS is all right. As a sequel to one of the best films of the '80s, it's a complete disappointment, with a watered-down script and even Oliver Stone off the boil. What happened to all the energy you used to find in his films? This one is sluggish and as a director he seems almost disinterested in the material.

There are some good things about this film, but they're mostly the bits that reflect the first. Inevitably, Michael Douglas is the best thing in it, but he's given way too little screen time and there's a betrayal of his character in the first movie in that he's softened up this time around; he's not the Gordon Gekko of old. Josh Brolin's corporate bad guy is all right, but the two youthful leads, Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan, are absolutely horrible.

LaBeouf is just out of his depth here and his acting stinks. The only film I liked him in was LAWLESS and all the rest have suffered as a result of his attempts at performance. Even worse is the single-expressioned Carey Mulligan's, whose perma-sad face is by far the most irritating thing in the whole movie. I almost had to look away every time she was on screen, she's that awful.

The material starts off half-interesting, but the storyline takes ages to develop. The first hour or so retains the attention, but then there's a long, dry patch in the middle before things pick up a little at the end. Unfortunately, the final opinion I came away with is that this is a lazy cash-in, nothing more. A film that concentrated on Gekko alone without any of this kid stuff would have been much more gripping...

It's 2008, 7 years after Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) got out of prison, and he's hocking his book. Meanwhile Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is trying direct investments into a new energy source. But the financial crisis is crashing his own workplace Keller Zabel Investments. His mentor Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) commits suicide. Jake marries Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan),and teams up with Gordon Gekko to bring down Bretton James (Josh Brolin) who destroyed his mentor.

This feels fake. There are better and more realistic and quite frankly documentaries about the 2008 financial meltdown. Others have explained it better. Hearing Gordon Gekko talking about it is like somebody trying to make poetry out of finance. The problem is that Oliver Stone is trying to inject a fictional story into something that's all too real. It amounts to a whole lot of meaningless gobbledygook. The story is nothing but trash. All that we have left to watch for are some fairly good performances.