Wall Street (1987)

"Stop going for the easy buck"

I was not yet born in 1987, let alone watching Oliver Stone crime thrillers. (As a teen, I always held Oliver Stone in my head as the epitome of a “grown up” filmmaker, probably because his films I knew of dealt with boring stuff like “politics” and “the stock market,” and also because the name Oliver was an old man name, not yet reclaimed as a popular baby name.) But I have to imagine that Wall Street is a more interesting film in 2026 than it was upon its release. It is both a production snapshot of a particular high-flying gaudiness associated with its era, and a spiritual snapshot: a tug-of-war for the soul of the mid-’80s yuppie and, consequently, of American financial capitalism at an inflection point. What we couldn’t have known for sure (though the ending suggests Stone guessed) is that the avalanche of corporate corruption and wealth consolidation would only get worse. Some of the dollar figures and financial crimes depicted look downright quaint in 2026.

A movie being “interesting” is not the same as it being “good,” though, and Wall Street only barely stumbles over that line, primarily on the strength of Michael Douglas’s charismatic villain, Gordon Gekko, the cutthroat, financio-sexual multi-millionaire who doesn’t hesitate to declare his villainy. “Greed is good,” he convinces an auditorium full of shareholders, and he lives the mantra from start to end. Douglas won an Oscar for the role, and I’m not objecting.

The story follows Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a hungry junior stockbroker whose father Carl Fox (Martin Sheen) is a working-stiff union leader at an airline. Bud cold-calls his way into Gekko’s orbit and gets seduced by the trappings: penthouses, designer suits, and a girlfriend named Darien (Daryl Hannah) who is as much a luxury accessory as the bizarre sushi-wrapping device in his condo. Bud finds himself trading insider tips and committing increasingly serious financial no-nos. Eventually, his two father figures, biological and corporate, collide, and Bud has to pick a moral lane. Beneath the ostentatious ‘80s decadence, Wall Street is a secular Pilgrim’s Progress about modern manhood and inheritance.

The film functions well enough thanks to Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser’s effective translation of the arcane mechanics of insider trading, leveraged buyouts, and corporate raids into something a layperson can follow. (I am such a layperson.) Stone has cited Paddy Chayefsky as the model, and Wall Street definitely has some DNA of a more straight-faced Network, but about stocks instead of TV. Even so, the actual financial machinations inevitably feel a bit ethereal: dollars getting shuffled around to harvest more dollars, nothing made, nothing built. Of course, that’s the point.

What hurts the film, in turn, is the film’s inability to trust that storytelling. Stone keeps shoving the themes directly into characters’ mouths: Bud gives a “who am I?” monologue as he gazes at the New York skyline, and Carl and Gordon alternate “here’s why I’m right” speeches throughout the screenplay. The soapbox quality of the writing flattens what should be the film’s most interesting topic of interrogating two clashing worldviews.

The deeper revisionist critique, which I share, is that Wall Street settles for a “few bad apples” diagnosis rather than bemoaning the festering systemic rot underneath it all. Gekko gets framed as a singular monster — most of the strokebrokers in this movie, including the charming Marvin (John C. McGinley), are, in fact, good guys — rather than the predictable and inevitable output of a system where ethics are irrelevant and the law can be easily skirted.

The acting is a mixed bag. Douglas is the obvious highlight, but Martin Sheen is not too far behind: He is sympathetic and weathered, grounding the whole film whenever the story shifts into his union hall. The real life father-son chemistry of the Sheens really powers their scenes together: In one late moment in the movie, Bud sits weeping beside his father ailing in a sick bed, and the exchange is genuinely tearjerking.

Charlie Sheen otherwise is a tougher proposition; his inexpressive stiffness was something Stone supposedly wanted for the blank slate Bud, but Stone was wrong. Sheen is pretty boring, until he’s compensating; the bigger emotional scenes veer into campy overacting. Hannah, meanwhile, is an obvious weak link, under-written and flatly performed, making the romantic subplot a zero.

Where the film finds personality is in its texture, offering a fascinating time capsule rendered in maximalist craft (that still might have benefited from being even more decadent). Robert Richardson’s camera prowls when Gekko is on screen, circling like a predator, and only locks into stillness in scenes with Carl, a visual grammar that does as much thematic lifting as the dozen or so soapbox monologues. Stone shoots mid-’80s Manhattan as a yuppie wonderland: orange sunrises off mirrored glass, gleaming sharkskin suits, a saturated neon-tint sheen… which is, either ironically or appropriately (I can’t decide), a perfect vessel for the seduction the film is critiquing. Stewart Copeland’s percussive synth score has the dated, synthy sound of its era, but is still great, propulsive and coked-up and inseparable from the film’s rhythm. I also enjoy the bookending of “Fly Me to the Moon” and Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” the beginning and ending selections telling a story of uneasy American values by themselves.

Stone made the film as a tribute to his own father, a Depression-era stockbroker, and originally titled it Greed. But the film is a reverse-image of Erich von Stroheim’s early cinema epic: Bud’s agony comes in spiraling upwards rather than downwards, his conscience dying of thirst in the (metaphorical) desert rather than his body. Gekko is reportedly a composite of infamous investors of the time (e.g. Dennis Levine) blended with Stone himself, whose speaking cadence shaped Gekko’s rapid-fire patter. The casting carousel was one fascinating near-miss after another: for Gekko, Fox wanted Warren Beatty, and Stone wanted Richard Gere, but fate intervened (positive). Meanwhile, Tom Cruise pursued the role of Bud before fate intervened (negative), as Stone committed to Charlie Sheen off the back of Platoon. A Cruise-Douglas sparring might have lifted the whole film a tier upwards.

One historical wrinkle that elevated Wall Street’s profile came in the film’s release timing: production wrapped before Black Monday, but Wall Street hit theaters that December with the crash still at the top of the headlines. That accidental quasi-documentary urgency is part of why Wall Street keeps getting rediscovered every time a new financial catastrophe occurs: savings & loan, dot-com, 2008, crypto, whatever’s next. It’s aged well compared to most other ’80s zeitgeist pictures in this regard, even as Gekko famously had the opposite of Stone’s intended effect: a generation of finance bros took him as inspiration rather than warning (one of my college roommates, for example, who studied finance and had a sign reading. “money over bitches” hanging over his bed). Stone, with Douglas in tow, eventually made a sequel post-’08 crash, and I’m curious how Stone’s lens on the ethics of Wall Street shifted over the following two decades.

So yes, the film is ultimately much more interesting than it is great. But interesting, sustained over almost forty years, eventually becomes its own kind of worth. Wall Street, for lack of a better word, is

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.