Gekko's Still Got Juice in Money Never Sleeps

"Greed is good," Gordon Gekko famously said in Oliver Stone's 1987 Wall Street, but maybe not in film directors. Critics say Stone crams too many story lines and sermons into the sequel, Money Never Sleeps, though Michael Douglas is still deliciously slimy as the ex-con stock trader.

• Douglas manages to "retain a sense of nasty fun," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal, but the rest of the movie is "pumped up to the bursting point with gasbag caricatures, overblown sermons and a semicoherent swirl of events surrounding the economy's recent meltdown."

• Stone has tried to fit far too many themes and subplots into Money Never Sleeps, complains Matt Neal at the Standard, who found the movie "a bit like talking to a bad financial adviser—mostly boring, overly complicated, and in the end you feel a little ripped off."
• The movie "has the drive, luxe and sarcastic wit of the snazziest Hollywood movies for most of its two-hours-plus running time ," writes Richard Corliss at Time, although Stone ends up going surprisingly easy on the financial world. "Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up as a tickle," he writes.

(More Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps stories.)