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Wall Street Customer Reviews (7 - 9 of 40 Reviews)

"I gave you your manhood!"
The ambience of the Reagan-era stock boom is captured perfectly in this iconic film, starring Michael Douglas, Martin Sheen, and Charlie Sheen.

The younger Sheen plays Bud Fox, a young up-and-coming stockbroker who worms his way into the heart of darkness of Wall Street mogul Gordon Gekko (Douglas), who seduces the younger man into a lifestyle of stylish excess.

Martin Sheen plays Charlie's father, a role he reprised from real life. In WALL STREET the elder Sheen is an airline mechanic and union man to the cuffs of his coveralls who tries desperately to make his bedazzled son hold fast to bedrock blue-collar values.

Although the ethics lesson is heavy-handed and obvious, WALL STREET's closing moral is satisfyingly vague and open to interpretation, giving this film an unintended depth that still draws audiences two decades later.

Douglas's Gekko is the avaricious embodiment of the Gimme Decade, believing that, from start to finish as the great tagline to this movie says, "Greed is good...Greed works." Director Oliver Stone named Gekko after the infamous "f.u. lizard" of Vietnam, and it's an appropriate choice. Gekko, as the embodiment of a kind of ethical darkness, has much in common with APOCALYPSE...NOW's Colonel Kurtz (another Sheen vehicle). He is eminently piratical, dismembering companies, enemies and sexual conquests (Daryl Hannah plays the girl) gloatingly.

Smudging the seemingly simple lines drawn in the sand, Douglas's Oscar-winning portrayal is so overwhelmingly powerful that it effectively capsizes the movie and inverts the lesson in ethics. The mesmerizing, beautifully polished Gekko, reeking of amorality, becomes a study in the Will to Power.

Gekko, quite ironically, is The Man We All Want To Be. His strength however, comes less from within himself than from his ability to tap into the egocentric desires of others around him. Never promising anything, like a magician he demonstrates everything, exuding authority and certainty in that most uncertain and least authoritative of all universes, finance. Generations of MBAs, CFPs, and hungry young men of all stripes have seen WALL STREET as a McGuffey's Reader of sorts, providing a template for the look, tone, and attitude of success. Events have not proven them wrong.

Even as the sycophants around him disgustingly reduce everything to a crude dollars-and-cents cost-benefit analysis (take note of Daryl Hannah's reaction to Gekko's tacky modern art collection), Gekko seems to be above it all. True, he exhibits the predatory instincts of an alley cat throughout the picture, but he is also undeniably alluring. Whether Douglas is portraying the hero or the villain of WALL STREET depends entirely on the viewer's perspective and mood.

It's Michael who makes the movie
A genuine classic about an ambitious and unprincipled young man headed for the top on WALL STREET. Michael does his best work here as the ice-cold inside trader and mentor to young Charlie who mostly smirks and looks confused the whole time, much like he does on his TV show TWO AND A HALF MEN MAKE ONE BRAIN, while Daryl glides from scene to scene in nice clothes grateful to Ollie for giving her such simple lines as, "That's what I like about you, Gordon. You're so twisted." But it's Gordon, I mean Michael who makes WALL STREET so memorable by parading an arrogance and self-absorption in the film matched only by his arrogance and self-absorption in real life. Great story, excellent movie.


"Now let me show you *my* charts." (cue lightning)
"Wall Street" is iconic.

But let's step back a second: I'll beging with a little Wall Street habit called Full Disclosure: Oliver Stone's stunning, iconic "Wall Street" is an amazingly hard movie for me to review, in part because it was, for me, one of those rare watershed events that shaped my futue and changed---even charted---my career.

One of Oliver Stone's best movies, it was intended as a morality play in which Stone's mouthpiece, played by Martin Sheen as a stoic airline mechanic who has seen it all, condemned the helter-skelter rampant greed of the corporate raiders, Wall Street insider tycoons, and high-flying investment bankers of the 1980's, the much maligned "Decade of Greed".

But let's stop for moment, and consider: how many of you who've seen the film wanted to *be* Gordon Gecko, "Wall Street"'s cigar chomping, greenmailing uber-dealmaker, who ratcheted up Ivan Boesky's "Greed is OK" into what became the motto of deal-makers the world over: "Greed is Good. Greed Works."

I sure did. Born during the hippy Summer of Love and a proverbial child of the eighties, I saw "Wall Street" and knew, immediately, what I wanted to become. I sliced off my mohawk, grew my hair, and slicked it back, and dedicated my life to mastering high finance and the art of the deal.

And I wasn't the only one, to judge by fellow MBA alums and investment banking colleagues; even a sequence in "Boiler Room" shows a new generation of deal-seeking young Turks watching "Wall Street" on a plasma TV, regaling each other with their word-perfect recitation of Gecko's lines.

"Wall Street", then, should be served up piping hot to the innocent with a dollop of caution: as one reviewer noted, what Stone had intended as a bloody criticism of greed gone rampant quickly became a full-bodied recruiting video for the investment banking industry.

And what a recruiting video it is: Stone perfected his quick cuts and 'wall of information' with "Wall Street", proving his mastery of the new MTV-era of rich, lush, rapidly moving images and an editing style that wouldn't have been out of place in a music video.

Stone is like that. As a director, he has an uncanny ability to glamorize that which he most wants to criticize, just as he did with the alluringly violent Mickey and Mallory Knox in "Natural Born Killers."

And "Wall Street" is one of those rare reversals where life imitates art: throughout top-tier MBA programs and modern investment banks, the image of the stalking, cigar-smoking, summer-home in the Hamptons, limo-insulated, braces-sporting deal maker has become the ideal, sometimes getting the better of real Wall Street mavericks who let romance cloud their common sense and appeared on the covers of Fortune and Forbes---only to be shot down by their envious employers.

The plot is nothing new: a Horatio Alger story in which hungry young stockbroker (played perfectly by Charlie Sheen) Bud Fox tires of spending his days in a cheap Queens apartment chasing small retail investors, and sets his sights on the 'elephant': the maverick corporate raider Gordon Gecko (played by Michael Douglas in the role of his career).

Fox, for once, has an opening beyond Gecko's favorite box of cigars: he knows his father's airline, Blue Star, is worth more than the market thinks it is because of impending deregulation in the airlines; Gecko takes the bait, and brings Fox, quickly, into the high-octane world of deal-making and insider information---as Gecko's spy.

The acting is uniformly good: apart from Sheen and Douglas, you have the inimitable Sean Young as Gecko's social-climbing wife, Darryl Hannah puckish as fashion designer Darien, pre-"The Limey" Terence Stamp hard as nails as a British corporate raider and Gecko's nemesis, and a troop of veteran character actors: Hal Holbrook as Fox's brokerage house mentor, James Spader as a naive M&A attorney, and the immortal James Karen as Fox's fickle boss.

From the opening riffs of Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" to the closing image of a trading grid imposed over the lower Manhattan skyline, Stone's editing and direction is fast-paced, frenetic, and exotic: the viewer, like Fox, is pulled into the upper reaches of a world where anything is possible and money is the common denominator.

There are some subtle touches, like Gecko's beach house, festooned with atrocious artwork kept only as an investment---and as a barometer of the notoriously fickle and fast moving Market itself.

And for those "Wall Street"-heads who have seen the movie a thousand times (I must be getting close), there are some sweet glitches the editors never caught: when Gecko makes his pitch for a 'friendly' takeover of Blue Star, watch his feet carefully.

Often imitated, never surpassed, "Wall Street" is a stylish, intoxicating, stunning embodiment of an era when anybody could carve his way to the very top of American society by ruthless ambition and sheer determination; it was true when it was made, and it is possibly even more true today.

So strap on your braces, slick back your hair, light up an Esplendido and fire up the DVD player---money never sleeps, pal.

JSG

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