gavin6942 A young and impatient stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider who takes the youth under his wing.Looking back on this film over twenty years down the road, it can be looked at one of two ways: either as an indictment of the 1980s and its consumerism. We learn, of course, that "greed is good", which may sum up the Reagan years. Or we can see it not so specifically and see that this is Wall Street, whether the 1980s or 1990s or beyond. Indeed, a sequel was made, and while I have not seen it, I suspect this is very much what we would see: the same bad behavior still going.That being said, this film ages really well. Just as it was an instant classic in its day, it is every bit the classic now (2015).

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.

david-sarkies Normally I would write a commentary on a movie within a few days of seeing it, however I have made an exception to this film because I really don't want to go through the bother of trying to find it again, and then sitting through two hours that the film takes to reach its conclusion. It is not that it is a bad movie, but rather it is a movie that I am not really all that interested in watching again. The only reason that I ended up watching this movie again (I have seen it twice now) was because I wanted to watch it before watching the sequel.We all know what this movie is about, and in fact this movie ended up creating a culture on Wall Street, with the style of shirt that Gordon Gecko wears being called a Gecko, and the phrase 'Greed is good' being bandied about. What is generally forgotten though is that the actual phrase is 'for lack of a better word, greed is good'. Rather surprising coming from a film whose intention is to actually criticise the casino culture of Wall Street, and the fact that people are stepping over the boundaries of illegality for the sack of greed. I guess though that the Wall Street millionaires that ended up watching this film probably did not see their actions actually being illegal (even though, like Gordon Gecko, they were practising insider trading and asset stripping companies – acts which in the end put Gordon Gecko behind bars).Unlike the sequel, which was made in response to the Global Financial Crisis, the original was made during one of Wall Street's hey days, when the market was going up and many people believed that the sky was the limit. However within a year the entire edifice would end up coming under strain when the Savings and Loans scandal hit and caused a stockmarket crash, followed by a recession, in America. Still, nobody learnt from their mistakes, and even before the crash on 08, there were a number of other crashes (and recessions) that preceded it.The other problem with films criticising Wall Street is, as I said, the Wall Street bankers generally do not take much notice of it, and those who do, generally do not have much influence to actually do anything about it. On the other hand those of us plebs who watch this film are reminded that those people in their ivory towers may be living the good life, but it does not last forever, and sometimes, having a clear conscience, is much better than having more money that you know what to do with.