Greed is back in the limelight as it weaves its way through the daily lives of the main characters and creates the madness, manipulation and lies that surround Wall Street in the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

A dramatic sequel to the original 1987 Wall Street, Director Oliver Stone complements the acting styles of Michael Douglas (Gordon Gekko) with Shia LaBeouf (Jake Moore), Carey Mulligan (Winnie Gekko), and Josh Brolin (Bretton James).

In writing Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff enhanced the world created by Stone and present the viewer a conspiracy theorist dream explanation for the events contributing to the current economic recession.

Setting the stage about 13 years after the original movie, the viewer is greeted with a comical introduction where Gordon is being released from prison. From a conviction that was alluded to during the original Wall Street, he served his sentence in prison for a charge of insider trading and other related white-collar crimes. Gordon gladly receives a large brick size cell phone from the late 1980’s and is floored when he realized the limousine parked outside the prison isn’t for him, but is in fact filled with the family members of a rapper who was released on the same day.

The story line is pushed forward with the interactions of Jake Moore, a Wall Street junkie with an environmentalist streak, and Winnie Gekko, the estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko.

Jake is entrenched in a fast paced world of “too big to fail” banking strategies as he learns that his mentor, Jules Steinhardt (played by Eli Wallach), commits suicide after the manipulations from rival banks cause Steinhardt’s company to fall apart.

Jacks mission to avenge the death of his mentor and the company he’d worked for is paralleled by Gordon’s need to avenge the loss of millions of dollars and the years that were taken from him by the insider trading conviction. Paying homage to the original movie, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps follows the ups and mostly downs of stock market manipulations and adds the current bailout negotiations that have become commonplace in the news.

The deception doesn’t stop with personal vendettas. In scenes that would tickle controversial documentary writer and director Michael Moore’s funny bone, the research into alternative energies is again and again pushed aside or suppressed.

The viewer can expect an amazing amount of dialogue, as with other Stone movies, and interactions between the various characters. Phrases like “toxic debt”, “too big to fail”, and “shorting sub-primes” are littered throughout. During a particularly interesting conversation between Gordon and Jake, Gordon talks about being let out of jail and realizing that the real criminals can all be found on Wall Street. He continues by saying that the acts that caused his conviction was trivial compared to the type of criminal acts being committed every day by the billionaires in the United States.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is entertaining and intellectual; it is littered with comical moments to entertain and ideas in the dialogue to entice the conspiracy theorist.