Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is a lush, talkative New York film, done up in an older dramatic realism style which caters to a longer attention span. Shia LaBeouf (Jake Moore) is winning, and Michael Douglas is shining once more — larger than life despite his real-life cancer. This mix of young talent (LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan) with seasoned stars (the great Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon) is a rare delicacy we should be hungry for more of. This sequel to 1987’s classic “Wall Street” segues smoothly. Director Oliver Stone’s father worked on Wall Street, and Stone captures the financial world well. Gordon “Greed is good” Gekko has been released from prison, and things have heated up at his old playground. 2010 couldn’t be a riper time for another look at how the money markets operate. Gekko sums up what has changed since his absence: “Now greed is also legal.” Gekko’s estranged daughter, Winnie (Mulligan), is marrying Jake. Gekko is using Jake to reconnect with his daughter, and Jake is out for vengeance against whoever destroyed his mentor’s company and life, and is using Gekko to that end. Gekko and Winnie both warn Jake that he is acting an awful lot like Gekko used to. But has Gekko actually changed? Do people like Gekko change? The writers sincerely makes more than one heavy-handed reference to marriage and children being the only things that really matters. And in the end, as Gekko explains how Wall Street really works, it’s not really about the money but the games between people, and he doesn’t say it, but the game is really about power. How much more power can I acquire than the next guy, the next company, the next bank, just because I can, because I figured out how to do it, and figured out also how not to get caught, and I have the guts to actually do it no matter who goes down because of it, even if it’s the whole country, the whole world? It’s kind of like the mob, where the only loyalties are not to friends or even kin, but just to the self left standing. The ending is not a downer, but it doesn’t ring true. It doesn’t end with a bang but a whimper after such a great set-up. In fact, the ending was so simplistic that it left many threads hanging. Otherwise — lots of food for thought here.