And now for something completely different... Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps in Cannes

The Cannes Film Festival 2010 is set against a backdrop of economic troubles, ash clouds affecting flight schedules and dull, overcast skies.

I keep imagining the film festival as a setting for a zombie movie given the pallid stares of film critics on their 20th film in a few days, Z list celebrities touting their wares and a raft of unwashed, unkept photographers jostling for snaps in a foreign land.

Last night I was able to watch a screening of the upcoming release Wall Street 2: Money never sleeps - one of the two big Hollywood movies here at Cannes alongside Robin Hood. Wall Street 2 stars Michael Douglas, reprising his role of Gordon Gecko from the 1980s original. Shia LeBoeuf plays the new kid on the block learning of the travails of high finance being used as a tool to recpaitalise Gordon as well as make money for 'the barracuda' who indirectly caused the suicide of LeBoeuf's mentor via the take out of the mentors brokerage firm.

The plot of the film draws on the backdrop of federal bail-outs of the investment banks like Citibank and the death of others such as Bear-Sterns. There are also a number of cameo appearances and insider type jokes such as Charlie Sheen turning up briefly to talk about taking over the Blue Star jet firm of the original film and turning into a world leading private jet brokerage firm (which, by the way actually exists in real life).

The film feels different to the original as it lacks the father-son relationship between Martin and Charlie Sheen, plus the film feels less like an introduction to how wall street really works which made the original an enduring film. On the plus side it is visually very well done capturing the stock market collapse of 2009. The film feels more emotionally driven tan the cold, hard film of the 1980s and I would have like to have seen more of the Gecko and the Barracuda going head-to-head the limit being one scene where Douglas's character makes one of the more memorable lines, "If you stop talking lies about me, I will stop telling the truth about you".

Brolin and Douglas are very strong actors in the film as is the brief role at the start of Frank Langella who I felt delivered the strongest performance of all having seen some of the shock first hand and fall-out in Wall Street over the past couple of years. I think there was some mis-casting though I hope the film does well as one of the best (and first) efforts to capture recent events by Oliver Stone (who of course appears in this film).