My wife and I stood in a line to see this at Union Square on opening night. What can I say about this film? I did not enjoy it, and there is something about its badness that makes it very difficult and unrewarding to review. Therefore, I’m just going to list out its problems and leave it at that.

Problem 1:  The story is kind of stupid and does not make a lot of sense. The set-up is non-existent and the characters and their relationships to each other are almost uniformly unconvincing. The whole thing seems like a hair-brained contrivance to get the character of Gordon Gecko back on screen and (simultaneously) to try to make a “statement” of sorts about the recent financial meltdown. The problem is that Gordon Gecko was a ridiculous artifact of the dark-ages of cinema (roughly 1983-1993) that really did not need to be resurrected, and Stone’s attempt  to weave in a commentary on the recent financial meltdown is pathetic and in my opinion very, very halfhearted, which is kind of maddening.

Problem 2: It has a heavy-handed, loud and very irritating score by that Talking Heads guy, and when a movie’s music is bad and overused it can make the whole experience miserable.

Problem #3: The dialog is, in a word, atrocious.

Problem #4: The incidental acting and supporting acting is piss poor. People were openly laughing at the “tense” scenes in the boardroom of the Fed because the delivery of the lines was so comically bad. And Eli Wallach turns in a performance so bizarre and embarrassing it can only be explained as rogue comic relief gone terribly wrong.

Problem #5: I’ve decided that Shia LaBeouf is just not a good thing in films, period.  He was bad in Eagle Eye, he was bad in Holes, and he’s bad here. I think the only reason he’s in this movie is because no good young actor would touch this role with a 10′ poll.

What does that leave? Michael Douglas is okay as Gordon Gecko, I suppose, but really he’s just jerking off the whole movie. Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin labor really hard to keep their dignity in this mess – I would say Mulligan succeeds (barely) and Brolin does not. Frank Langella labors too, but he really fails!

The first Wall Street was a bad movie. Why on earth did we need a sequel?

Skip it!