TOMASBBloodhound Definitely one of Oliver Stone's better films, this indictment of corporate raiders and unscrupulous stock brokers hasn't lost any of its impact since the same type of activities are still in practice, and the gap between rich and poor in the United States has never been higher. But nowadays, since Wall Street has learned to finance the Democrat Party and pay lip service in the press to liberal causes, we hear a lot less about "wall street greed" in the national media. Now many of them are just as hypocritical as they are greedy. But Stone's film is all about the Wall Street of its day. In other words, we get lots of suspenders, big gray cell phones, women with big hair, and shots of people smoking in public. Throw in a scene with a cheesy robot, and you have a an 80s film on your hands. Seriously, what was is with lame robots in 80s films? Rocky IV, R.O.T.O.R., Revenge of the Nerds, Short Circuit.... digressing here.The plot deals with a fresh-faced, but oily-haired Charlie Sheen working as a hustling young stock broker. He doesn't seem to be doing that well at it, he is mired in debt, and his working-class hero father doesn't respect his line of work. He spends every free minute trying to get into business with Michael Douglas, who is one of the most feared and respected traders in the business. Finally a box of Cuban cigars hand delivered on his birthday is enough to get Sheen into the door. Desperate to get on Douglas's good side, Sheen leaks some insider info about the airline his father works for. It ends up making Douglas some $$, and starts Sheen on his way quickly up the financial ladder. But as you'd expect, Sheen wants it all too fast, and he ends up not only using illegal insider trading practices, but he also ends up as a pawn in Douglas's plan to take over the the airline. You don't have to know all that much about the business to follow the story, but it helps to pay attention. There is a lot of dialogue, and most of it is important.The casting is exceptional. Charlie and Martin Sheen make a great father-son pairing. Probably better than they do in real life. Martin Sheen gets to do plenty of sermonizing about the value of hard work and whatnot, and you have to think he loved the chance to play this character. Michael Douglas gives probably his most memorable performance as the evil Gordon Gekko. "Greed is good..." etc... He is almost good enough to convince you his character isn't even that bad of a guy. Douglas actually rises about the character in a sense. Hal Holbrook is on hand as a veteran broker who tries to talk Sheen out of chasing the quick buck. He is always appreciated in any film. Wall Street strikes out, however, with its two main female characters. Darryl Hannah is lost as Sheen's tacked-on love interest. Its a thankless role she isn't even talented enough to handle. Honestly, why was she wearing a wet-suit in her scene on the beach. Wouldn't some kind of swimsuit have been more logical or hot? And Sean Young as Douglas's wife?? Always a train wreck, she was apparently such a problem on the set that her role was drastically reduced. Overall, a very good film though. 8 of 10 stars.The Hound.

Ole Sandbaek Joergensen Maybe watching this back in the day would have made a greater impression, I think Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas is a great performance, and the green Bud Fox by Charlie Sheen fits in very nicely.I don't get the Wall Street world and never will I guess, but I can see the glamor and money and esteem by the peers if you do it well. That is what this is all about, making money and thereby making a name for yourself. In such a competitive world, wouldn't all try to cheat just a little if they had the knowledge to it...This is a good film, has a lot of content I can't understand, but the basics is alright, if Greed is Good, well if you don't get caught up in it or caught by doing something illegal to achieve it, yes then it might be worth it.

David Conrad Martin Sheen plays a blue-collar worker. You know he's a blue-collar worker because he always wears an unbuttoned blue shirt stained with mechanic's grease, and he hangs out in a classic dive bar in Queens with his burly, beer-drinking buddies. He wishes that his son, played by Charlie Sheen, would have become this or that instead of a stockbroker. Can you guess which two professions he envisions for his son? If you guessed lawyer and doctor, congratulations, you've seen a movie and you know the clichés. And if you've paid attention, you know why that cliché is all wrong for Martin Sheen's character. He is created in the classic image of the hard-working, straight- shooting, lunch-pail-carrying union man, so what use does he have for a lawyer son any more or less than a stockbroker son? All a doctor son would do is tell him to put out the cigarettes he smokes as a kind of socio-political statement. If it's just upward mobility he's after for his son (it's not, as he makes clear), then high- powered trader ought to be good enough. His "lawyer or doctor" speech is not just a hack line of dialogue, it's the wrong hack dialogue in the wrong hack character's mouth.Between that early scene and the end, "Wall Street" and the people in it change very little. The mode of expression is obvious and labored and faux-intellectual for the duration. The movie is Oliver Stone's spoonful of supposed truth about the rotten core of American capitalism, force-fed to audiences without any adulteration of wit or charm. A lot of critics and audiences lapped it up in 1987. They and the Oscar voters were Father Stone's choir, happy to give a pass to his pulpit-pounding so long as he was sticking it to the Reaganites and Thatcherites. Michael Douglas's Gordon Gecko and his British counterpart played by Terrence Stamp are the strawmen who stand in for the latter groups. Conveniently, they know they are bad guys. They don't have the pesky tendency of real-world people to believe that they're basically decent. When Gecko says "Greed is good," one of many soundbytes the script tries on and one of few that fits, he is trying to persuade a roomfull of stockholders that capitalism is the engine of progress and a force for good in the world. If he believed that, as many people do, he'd have been a much more interesting figure. The characters played by the Sheens would have to engage him more thoughtfully in order to make a case to the contrary. Happily for them, no such effort is required by them, Stone, or the audience, because Gecko doesn't really believe what he says; he knows he's hurting others, and he doesn't care. The lifestyle he has, the language he uses, and the amorality he cultivates all exist in real life, and maybe sociopaths like him do exist in greater proportions on Wall Street than on Main Street. But characters as black and white as Douglas and Martin Sheen's are the exception. "Wall Street" is a fantasy movie, the world as Stone's conspiratorial mind imagines it to be. It is neither politically nor emotionally intelligent.It is, however, cheesy, and this goes a long way toward making the film watchable. Charlie Sheen's Bud breaking down by a hospital bed is as old a chestnut as the scene where his meat-and-potatoes father looks askance at a hoity-toity piece of sushi and the one where Gecko quotes Sun-tzu. These moments are so earnest and yet so cartoonish that they create some unintentional levity by virtue of their familiarity.There is some good stagecraft and visual communication in "Wall Street." Many shots are stuffed front to back with people, and this brings the always-inhuman spectacle of the trading floor into the usually quieter spaces of white-collar offices and the executive conference rooms. All levels of the Wall Street world are thus implicated in the madness. At the back and along the edges of many of these crowded rooms, Stone carefully places "real" workers doing hands-on jobs: window-washers, janitors, many of them minorities and women. This is as subtle as the film gets, and it is more effective in its quiet way than Gecko's villainy or Martin Sheen's self- righteousness.

santiagocosme I have only just watched this movie today, which means my review comes around 30 years too late. The movie is OK, not great, but definitely watchable. The plot is a little too predictable in my opinion. Maybe it wasn't 30 years ago. This is yet another story about how a young man is pretty much willing to sell his soul to make it to the top of the financial world: Wall Street. And he does so by joining forces with the most ruthless of investors: Michael Douglas. A man whose only pleasure comes from making money without any regards for anything or anyone. The predictable twist comes when the two characters are about to close a multi billion airline deal. It they go ahead with their plan, great wealth awaits both of them, but the young broker's father and thousands of other co-workers lose their jobs in the process. The young broker faces the ultimate dilemma: to become what he had always wished for or to save his father by relinquishing his dreams. But if he does the latter, he takes down his partner...Not telling you the end, otherwise there's nothing left to watch.I'll just finish by saying that its a good enough movie (and I am extremely fussy) to watch on a Sunday afternoon, while you check your whatsapp and your facebook feed.