Wall St: Money Never Sleeps is a forgettable and commercial sequel to Oliver Stone's influential Wall Street. I call it commercial because a lot of the plot (especially the ending) seems driven by what a studio would want in a film and not what Stone would want to say about what's going on. To make up for this, there are some long moments in which characters explain the evils of the current financial world in which we live but the film is mainly a kind of rushed revenge story with Shia Lebeouf's character being stuck between avenging his fallen company and mentor or staying true to the love of his wife, Gekko's daughter, who abhors Wall St. and all of the cutthroat machismo that comes with it.

The acting in the film was good although neither Carey Mulligan nor Shia do anything to silence their detractors. I like both of them but people who don't like them weren't impressed by their performances. (And I do have to admit that Shia does always play a fairly similar character in all of his films.) The direction and editing was solid (save for one laugh out loud effect; you'll know it if and when you see it) and the film was always entertaining; it just didn't amount to anything and was immediately forgotten moments after the credits started rolling. In fact, one of the best things about the film might have been the soundtrack, including one of the songs from the original film - The Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place".

I'd definitely recommend adding Wall St.: Money Never Sleeps to the Netflix queue but there's really no reason to trek out to the theaters to see it, especially with The Social Network and Let Me In opening this weekend along with the wider release for Waiting for Superman, the supposedly excellent doc about the education in America. (I say "supposedly" with no snark intended; I simply haven't seen the film yet.) I've also heard decent things about "Easy A" and some mixed reviews on "Catfish" so maybe those are better options than the mediocre Ollie Stone Hollywood fare.