Michael Douglas returns as Gordon Gekko, but this time character trumps outrage in 'Money Never Sleeps'

You expect Oliver Stone to smash his big socialist hammer over the head of high finance in "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps," but it's a blow that never lands.

The movie is short on outrage, long on character, even longer on anticlimax - it's like heading out to a heavyweight prizefight and ending up at the avant-garde theater.

Stone, who farmed out the writing to Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, is surprisingly soft on the subject of the recent mortgage-bubble meltdown.

The movie ruminates thoughtfully on bubbles as an inevitable outgrowth of human nature, of nature itself, and is resigned to the idea that boom and bust cycles are part of life.

But is this why we go to Oliver Stone movies, thoughtful rumination? Where is the guy who argued that LBJ murdered JFK?

Semiretired, apparently. In "W," the worst late-vintage Stone could say about George Bush was that he was an out-of-his-depth child, a figure to be pitied.

And Gordon Gekko? Stone's notorious avatar of all that is wrong in Wall Street? Well, he's an old pussycat. Gekko returns in "Money Never Sleeps" as a chastened felon, fresh from jail and hawking a book, telling college kids he has a lot in common with them - no income, no job, no assets.

Deep down, though, he wants to get back in the game, and sees an opening when he meets Jacob (Shia LaBeouf), the young man engaged to his bitterly estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan). Jacob is a young Wall Street hotshot with a heart (and probably a portfolio) of gold. He wants to fund clean energy and he wants to arrange a father-daughter reconciliation.

Gekko takes the young man under his vulture's wing, although his motives for doing so are murky. Jacob, for instance, gets involved in a financial transaction that places Gekko tantalizingly close to the millions in his daughter's offshore trust fund.

"Money Never Sleeps" works very hard to involve us in the relationship triangle, with mixed results. One wonders if this might have been a more interesting (though less marketable) movie had the writers eliminated Jake as the middle man and concentrated on Gekko's rocky relationship with his daughter.

As it stands, Mulligan is mired in a hopeless role (she works at a nonprofit do-gooder website). It's the same one women usually get in a Stone movie - expressing shrill disappointment at the men in her life.

Meanwhile, around the edges of the movie, there is a roman a clef about the meltdown and bailout. Aficionados can have modest fun looking for stand-ins for Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and other Wall Street big shots.

One is played by Josh Brolin, who serves the story as an alternative role model for Jacob, someone to provide a hard edge as Gekko gets softer. Alas, like Mulligan, he isn't given much to do. (Ditto for Susan Sarandon in a weak role).

The only performance that really matters is Douglas, revisiting one of his great roles. He's fine, but he was actually better earlier this year in "A Solitary Man," another portrayal of a disgraced businessman on the road to rehabilitation, which had the advantage of a smarter, tighter, more focused script.