I feel sort of obligated to say more about why I didn't like Wall Street. I think it's partially just that while Rain Man has some definitive eighties touches, the events could plausibly have been set thirty years further back in the past or further in the future, and with some tweaks about the medical understanding of autism, would have worked just fine. The conditions that made Wall Street both plausible and scandalous have been obliterated. Gordan Gekko is something of a piker compared to businessmen today. Bud Fox's ambition and trashy taste seem like a failure of imagination rather the pinnacles of excess. And no movie today would have a group of union presidents storm in as exemplars of righteousness and as key players in a plot twist. Watching the movie made me feel ancient and nostalgic, and I was all of three years old when it was released.
And I think as much as I liked Michael Douglas's performance, Oliver Stone didn't have the ambition to create a full portrait of the Devil. The fundamentals of the character are great: Gordan Gekko has an easier time than Mephistopheles ever did at doing wrong, since humanity is setting itself up to be exploited, and is eager to exploit other people. But at the same time, the Devil's sold out. He's buying his way onto public boards and amassing an art collection, not because he wants to make either the Bronx Zoo or art collecting ridiculous or agents of evil, but because on some level he wants to be respectable. The characterization would have been better, and I rarely say this, if Stone had been willing to commit to one extreme or another, to make Gekko either totally evil and manipulative, able to see Bud Fox coming for him and ready for it, or if he'd been willing to make him genuinely pathetic, undone not by his tactics but by his desire for respectability. Gordon Gekko shouldn't actually be human in the final analysis.
There are other, obvious flaws with the movie. Darryl Hannah really, really should have been permitted to drop out of the role. A blonde interior decorator named after an aspirational Connecticut suburb needs a higher level of irony than Hannah's mustered into her combined roster of acting roles. Stone may have liked Charlie Sheen's flat acting style, but it doesn't serve him well in expressing pathos, or in making his rage seem anything other than a temper tantrum. Reducing the other traders at the firm to archetypes is unfortunate: it could have been a funnier, more multi-layered supporting cast, and the firing of the older broker who has no retirement savings could have been better-developed as a more realistic downside to the way the movie's main characters are living.
I do think Wall Street is beautifully shot. The initial circling around the Twin Towers has acquired an additional power over time, of course. But the opening journey through a crowded New York commute and the closing shot of the crowds going into and out of the courthouse are wonderfully choreographed: Bud emerges from the masses and then returns to them. And the shot of Michael Douglas on the beach in the early morning, watching the wave crest behind him is just gorgeous, a powerful and effective metaphor that transcends its own corniness.