Bud Fox is a Wall Street stockbroker in early 1980's New York with a strong desire to get to the top. Working for his firm during the day, he spends his spare time working an on angle with the high-powered, extremely successful (but ruthless and greedy) broker Gordon Gekko. Fox finally meets with Gekko, who takes the youth under his wing and explains his philosophy that "Greed is Good". Taking the advice and working closely with Gekko, Fox soon finds himself swept into a world of "yuppies", shady business deals, the "good life", fast money, and fast women; something which is at odds with his family including his estranged father and the blue-collared way Fox was brought up.
Michael Douglas is one fantastic actor and certainly does take after his Dad, Kirk Douglas. His performance as Gordon Gekko is perhaps the best performance he has delivered in his career and probably always will deliver! He certainly proved that by gaining the Best Leading Actor Academy Award in 1988 (as well as earning a shared one in 1975 for being a producer of Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest). Anyway, what I really liked about Gekko was that he was a despicable schemer who is a deep-down psychopath. He rightfully deserved that Academy Award and has shown us one of the most powerful cinema villains of all time. That is normally why I prefer villains over heroes because they are more powerful and have a deeper personality and take things a bit further which makes them more interesting. Charlie Sheen already rose to shine in Oliver Stone's Vietnam war film Platoon and starred alongside a group of fantastic actors but this time, he works alongside another fantastic actor: Michael Douglas who is also the son of a very famous actor (Kirk Douglas) just like Sheen is a son of a famous actor. Anyway, Sheen didn't deliver as spectacular as Douglas did but he certainly wasn't far off from that level of quality acting. It is sometimes hard to fit in two leading characters without making it too much but it worked very well with Douglas and Sheen in their roles. Daryl Hannah was very good as Darien Taylor and Martin Sheen portrays Carl Fox who is Bud's father so it is father and son in both the film and in real life.
Wall Street was one of Oliver Stone's early films but despite that, he still has already earned top Oscar glory not once but twice (Platoonand Born On The Fourth Of July) and it is an extremely underrated work of Stone's that I think deserved more recognition and credit for than some other directors did that year for the films they did. Stone is a director like the late Stanley Kubrick and the great Steven Spielberg in terms of making films that are part of pretty much every single genre there is but Stone is slightly weaker especially from the films that we see of it nowadays in comparison to the films he did earlier in his career. Wall Street was a tribute by Oliver Stone towards his late father Lou Stone who was a stockbroker during the Great Depression in World War II and that made the film rather special but at the same time, quite extraordinary. The script was fantastically written! I have always admired at how people write scripts about this sort of thing about crime, money and gangsters and this is one of the finest screenplays of that genre I have listened to.
Overall, Wall Street is an absolutely brilliant film that should be up there with some of the very best crime and gangster films that have ever been made. It is perhaps a film that I think Martin Scorsese would be proud of and would enjoy watching. I think that they should have left this film alone and not made the sequel even though that was still enjoyable. It's a great film for those who at least like crime films but those who don't, they won't be so lucky with liking this one. Basically, it is a hard film to not like but it is also one of those films that you can't rave about.
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