Well of course I went to see “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” this weekend. I’m the editor of a magazine that writes about securities regulation and ethical business conduct. How could I not go see it?
Unfortunately, watching the film was a hardship assignment. It’s awful. The plot is a dull morality play, pinned to the background of a financial crisis that the director, Oliver Stone, didn’t really understand. You can’t hold that against him too much; nobody else really understands how the financial crisis happened either. But Stone fills the film with caricatures rather than characters, who spout tinny platitudes (“No matter how much money you make, you’ll never be rich!”) and hackneyed references to the financial meltdown (“You know those subprimes you’re selling are crap.”) For anyone with even a modest understanding of modern Wall Street, you feel like Stone didn’t even care whether history fit well with the message he was so eager to deliver—he just wanted to deliver his message.
