It's the cinematic version of the futures market. Five months before the sequel to Oliver Stone's (for good or ill) era-defining Wall Streetopens, attendees at the Cannes Film Festival were offered an option on the film. Do you want our advice? Sell! Sell! Sell!
In returning to the material, Stone faces two linked dilemmas, neither of which he manages to tidy away.
Firstly, there is the fact that, having once had a grudging respect for the financial buccaneers, the general public now unambiguously hates their collective guts. Secondly, the financial battlefield has just become too darn complicated.
Money Never Sleeps(good title, incidentally) begins hilariously with Michael Douglas's Gordon Gecko leaving prison after serving the second of two sentences for financial misconduct. He is handed a money clip ("with no money in it") and a mobile phone the size of Gibraltar. So far, so satisfactorily broad.
While Michael has been inside, his daughter (Carey Mulligan), traumatised by her brother’s suicide, has elected to shun the old rogue and has begun working in some sort of ethical, green internet thing. She has also hooked up with a young whizz-kid – employee of a company eerily like Lehman Brothers – played with tolerable charm by Shia LaBoeuf. When the firm collapses, the youngster gets torn between two Mephistopheleses: a superficially reformed Gecko and Josh Brolin’s sleek corporate thief.
Stone has admitted that he was shocked by the way Gecko became a role model in the first film and, thus chastened, the director has made his villains more irrefutably horrid this time round. Deprived of that dubious charge, however, the film becomes, for much of its duration, a dull plod through ledgers, backroom deals and the drearier corners of the internet. In the same way that Russell Crowe only became "Robin Hood" for about 10 minutes, Douglas offers us just a few brief glimpses of the man we loved to despise. For the rest of the picture, Gecko is a weird blend of Merlin and Deepak Chopra. It's like The Dark Knightwithout the Joker.
Stone has certainly cast his nicely shot film in depth – Charlie Sheen returns briefly and somewhat puzzlingly – but, for the first time in this overly flashy director's career, you find yourself yearning for a bit more pizazz. Compared with its predecessor, Money Never Sleepsis for wimps.
Arts, Monday: Reviews of new films from Mike Leigh and Woody Allen
Arts, Tuesday: Donald Clarke's Cannes diary
