MICHAEL DOUGLAS IS A FAMILIAR FACE FROM MY CHILDHOOD. I don't mean Michael Douglas and I were childhood friends; I would have to have been in elementary in 1953 to manage that. More like, Michael Douglas was a star back when I was a kid in the hell-yeah'ing, God-loving Eighties. He was my kind of star. Knew his way around a suit and a mini-bar. Seemed like he had a firm handshake. Stately grizzle; like, sure he had a hangover most mornings, but he wasn't gonna be a dick about it. Remember Romancing The Stone and Jewel Of The Nile? The Indiana Jones rip-offs with Danny DeVito and Kathleen Turner before she got fat? Indy was far and away the fattest gangsta on my screen back in the day, but Dougy did his thing in those flicks. Indy would have won drinking games, but Mike would have slayed him on the slopes, if you know what I mean.
His dad is double-triple O.G. Kirk Douglas, who ruled in Paths Of Glory, one of Stanley Kubrick's first and finest movies. His wife is Catherine Zeta Jones, who managed to become one of the hottest women ever despite the considerable handicap of being Welsh. And he was the lead in one of the best movies about Los Angeles ever, Falling Down.
So when nobody showed the slightest interest in checking out Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I gladly took myself out for dinner and a movie. I'm tired of most of you anyway. But this is not a good movie, guys. Uninspired. Confusing. The dialog reminds me of my nephew staging a conversation between two action figures. The lead is Shia LeBeouf, whose dramatic range, as this clip demonstrates, consists of him saying "no no no" a lot. Douglas is obviously the high point, but even he phones it in. If reading from a teleprompter while raising your eyebrows a lot is acting, then I'm the next Michael Douglas. Money Never Sleeps misses so many golden opportunities, the biggest being the chance to have become the defining movie of a critical point in American economic history, as the original was for the Eighties. And all because, well, it sucks. I mean, it's just not good.
Can't wait for Wall Street III.
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