Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps continues the saga of Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate trader.

As in the first film, Gekko takes a young stockbroker under his wing. The twist this time is that the stockbroker, Jake Moore, played by Shia LaBeouf, allies himself with the infamous Gekko behind the back of Gekko’s daughter, who is also Jake’s girlfriend. Jake wants to avenge the ruin of the brokerage firm he works for and his mentor’s suicide with Gekko’s help, in exchange for helping Gekko reconcile with his daughter.

I was pleased to see Michael Douglas playing Gekko again. I was interested in seeing what LaBeouf would bring to the film, and he did a decent job in it.

While the acting was fairly good, I can’t say the same about the plot line.

The movie was excruciatingly slow moving and the barely-over-two-hours movie felt much, much longer. It started out with many questions, and finished off with only some of them answered, and with plenty new ones.

The film was very complicated and hard to follow, even confusing my parents at times, with too many things going on that were not properly explained enough to fully make sense of how or why they were happening. The poorly developed characters resulted in unnatural responses and a very forced ending.

Through the movie, Jake, in his narrative, talks about bubbles in a strange manner that really takes away from the entire thing.

I was excited about the brief return of the original’s lead figure, Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, but very disappointed at the bizarre cameo he was given.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, although not terrible, was not superb either, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you were someone who loved the original.

Aran Kirschenmann, 15, is a contributing writer for the Bellevue Reporter and a freshman at The International School in Bellevue.