You have to hand it to Oliver Stone. No other director is as quick to respond to era-defining events or as obsessed with marking national identity as he. Of course, more often than not his coke-fuelled directing style ruins worthy attempts at documenting the life of Nixon, George W Bush, or the assassination of JFK, but at least he’s trying. And after the insultingly sentimental World Trade Centre, Stone is back on the familiar furious territory with a return to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

Set in 2008, on the cusp of the global financial meltdown, Gekko (Michael Douglas) is released from prison. Instead of returning to the shady world of the stock market, he releases a book on the financial shenanigans of the noughties and attempts to ‘tell it like it is’. His lectures inspire one Jacob Moore (the ever-charming Shia Labeouf), a talented stock trader who happens to be the fiancé of Gekko’s estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan). In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Jacob uses Gekko’s advice to bring down the man (John Brolin as Bretton James) responsible for the bankruptcy of his adored employer Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella), and also reunite Gekko with his daughter.

So now Stone is responsible for dramatising the two most defining moments of the last decade for the Western World. But unlike World Trade Centre, there is a good story lurking in Wall Street 2. The world of the US stock market is as shady as ever, with Stone depicting the pow-wows like a gangster flick, all dark rooms and menace. And admittedly, it’s important for mass audiences to see what is essentially an accurate representation of the deplorable actions taken by institutions to protect themselves by screwing over the competition and the public (the silent victims in this film).

It’s only a shame that these issues are placed in the background of what is a poorly told drama. In Wall Street, we felt for Charlie Sheen’s character Bud (who makes a cameo appearance in the sequel) due to the tension between choosing the life of a cut-throat trader and honouring his father’s honest life. We get none of this in the sequel. Jacob is an obnoxious know-it-all, as displayed by his arrogance about his bike-riding skills. He’s smart, and he does have faith in alternative energy, but ultimately it’s hard to care for the upstart. Likewise, Winnie had the potential to be the film’s emotional core but the film utilises her merely to cry on cue. The dialogue is occasionally embarrassing: Langella talks like he’s from a Western, and Gekko’s monologue on money (which the film derives its silly title from) is laughable. The twist in the plot is predictable, and the film’s worst crime is in the resolution, which makes little sense in light of the huge emotional betrayal inflicted on Winnie and Jacob.

As always, Stone’s direction lets him down. For every moment of witty observation (particularly the dazzle of a charity event amidst the crumbling financial system), he get heavy-handed visual metaphors, such as a bubble ascending out of Central Park, or an image of collapsing dominos during a stock-market crash montage. If the drama was solid enough, Stone wouldn’t need to evoke such obvious imagery, and it comes across as intrusive.

With the world still reeling from this global economic crisis, it feels as if Stone missed the mark. With the long term problems still to emerge, Wall Street 2 comes across as a rushed project. He failed to construct an engaging narrative and instead delivered a disappointing and frankly unbelievable story which may indeed instil distrust in the worthy tale of this momentous and downright scary meltdown.