Oliver Stone's follow-up to his Oscar winning 'Platoon' moves through a different battleground: the high-tech jungle of corporate takeovers and insider stock trading scams. Not unpredictably, the film shows the same dizzy, kinetic intensity as its predecessor, and the same unfortunate reliance on ham-handed melodramatic exposition. Some of it couldn't be avoided: few laymen can pretend to understand the mechanics of high finance (not to mention its arcane language and customs), forcing Stone to depend on simple, stock characters and distracting camera pyrotechnics, with his lens constantly dipping and rising over even the most banal dialogue passages (at one point the screen isn't able to contain all the visual hype, and splits into multiple images). Stone's screenplay, like his overdressed cosmetic style, is too quickly and too often sidetracked into histrionic overkill, but the film at least earned Michael Douglas a well-deserved Academy Award for his energetic reading of a one-dimensional villain role.
Review of Wall Street
