Wall Street didn’t need a sequel. Oliver Stone’s 1987 descent into the moral cesspool of 1980s finance stands alone as one of the defining artistic representations of that decade’s mood and excesses. Ruthless money-making machine Gordon Gekko — masterfully portrayed by Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his performance — has endured as one of film’s greatest villains. There’s no reason we had to know what happened after the inevitable prison sentence we know is coming as that film draws to a close.

That said, I wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea of seeing a post-incarceration Gekko. Sure, Wall Street was ostensibly the story of Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox — who is brought back for a confusing and oddly campy cameo in which Sheen seems to be lampooning his own image, rather than playing an adult version of Fox. But it’s Douglas who steals the show. And Wall Street greed, which Gekko so famously pronounced “good” the first time around, has certainly not subsided. So Money Never Sleeps seemed like a potentially timely opportunity to bring the character back.

But, like the first movie, this is not Gekko’s story, but rather that of a young financial whiz kid, Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), coming face-to-face with the skewed ethics of his profession. Moore is an idealist, trying to guide the investment bank he works at towards sinking millions of dollars into alternative energy research. His girlfriend, Winnie (Carey Mulligan), isn’t a huge fan of where he works — she happens to be Gekko’s estranged daughter, and no fan of Wall Street culture — but admires his commitment to lefty causes, as she runs a feisty liberal blog, somewhat in the mold of Talking Points Memo.