Update: The teaser has found its way to YouTube and is embedded below.
So the teaser for Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” has debuted on IMDB of all places, which is a great place to put it if you want no one to see it (no embed codes, no front page placement), but judging by the ninety second clip, we wouldn’t blame them.
Set to a hilarious and awfully portentous, beat heavy score, the brief lines of dialogue we’re given seem to indicate that screenwriter Allan Loeb doesn’t know a heavy-handed cliche he hasn’t already met. Michael Douglas, reprising his role as a former Wall Street kingpin Gordon Gekko says in a voiceover, “Someone reminded me I once said ‘greed is good’, now it seems it’s legal” which, as far as commentary goes on current economic woes, sounds fairly tired.
But the choicest morsel of dialogue goes to Shia LaBeouf who earnestly intones, “No matter how money you make Mr. Gekko, you’ll never be rich,” to which we nearly fell out of our chair. It seems Loeb is cribbing moral lessons from Charles Dickens, and we’re pretty sure we’ve heard similar insights on countless third-rate sitcoms. The clip is rounded out by shots of Frank Langella looking angry, Carey Mulligan looking like a woman we want to marry and a mobile phone gag we have to admit made us smile.
We’re going to assume this is the “rock ‘n roll” teaser mostly aimed for the younger, Shia-loving crowd and that a meatier (we hope), longer trailer is still in the works.
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” opens on April 23, 2010. You can also have a look at the new poster which has popped up on IMDB to the left.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Emerging from a lengthy prison stint, Gordon Gekko finds himself on the outside of a world he once dominated. Looking to repair his damaged relationship with his daughter, Gekko forms an alliance with her fiancé Jacob (Shia LaBeouf), and Jacob begins to see him as a father figure. But Jacob learns the hard way that Gekko – still a master manipulator and player – is after something very different from redemption.
At the very least, we’ll have something pretty to look at, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shot the film, and he’s done some pretty stellar work in the past on, “Broken Embraces,” “Babel,” “21 Grams” and “Brokeback Mountain” among many others.