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Remember when things like insider trading were actually considered bad?

Oliver Stone does. He made the original 1987 Wall Street, in which insider gerrymandering was one of the gravest crimes of Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s unscrupulous corporate raider. Gekko did some serious time between films, but upon getting out notes that no one’s responsible for anything on the Street anymore.

That’s just before the H-bomb of the 2008 financial crisis, and it’s the dysfunctional business culture that precipitated it that concerns Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It’s not as angry an indictment as I’d expected; it’s not nearly as cutting as, say, The Yes Men Fix the World.

Yet this remains an entertaining melodrama, that in its own way encapsulates the values of American high finance. What Stone has done is channel those insights into a populist revenge thriller, in which a bushy-tailed and idealistic young American go-getter (Shia LaBoeuf) takes on the forces that nearly caused a second Great Depression — embodied in a single convenient villain.

That would be Bretton James (Josh Brolin), who has no qualms about spreading false rumours to devalue a venerable investment firm. When stock prices drop, the firm’s head, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella), is forced by James to sell for a humiliating number. The next day, he jumps on the subway tracks.

The scene of Zabel’s forced submission is one of the movie’s most definitive. James offers two dollars a share. Five, Zabel says. Three, James counters. Fine, says Zabel, four. Just so it doesn’t look so pathetic.

There’s a pregnant pause, in which we see a thin, cruel smile at the edges of James’s lips. Three, he repeats. And not a dime more.

Basically, James is the kid who pins you to the ground, puts a knee in your back, and forces you to eat dog shit. He’s a sociopath who lives to savour power over others, and divest them of all dignity.

Jake, the LaBeouf character, loved old Louis, and wants revenge. To get it, he enlists Gekko’s help behind the back of his girlfriend (Carey Mulligan), who’s also Gekko’s daughter. That’s basically the plot. The question is whether Gekko is still the same old snake.

Is Wall Street really about money? Not so much. Rather, as Gekko observes, it’s about the game. The money is just the measure of how well you played. One of the images that struck me most is the wizened face of old Eli Wallach, who plays a financier. How much money does he need, after all? At his age?

Then there’s Gekko himself, who eventually pulls an unexpected dirty trick. Why? It’s not out of greed either, but spite. He wants revenge of his own, which you’ll have to see the film to understand. But what’s remarkable is how thin-skinned and precious this macho dick-swinger really is.

So Wall Street as a nest of sociopaths and narcissists – that’s Stone’s rosy vision. Yet with the more straight arrow Jake character, the movie’s making another (fair) point: that there’s inherently nothing wrong with the pursuit of profit, as long as it doesn’t destroy everything around it and leave nothing but itself.

Jake wants a certain standard of living. And he has an imagination: he really believes in green energy, which is where he’s socking his investments. Perhaps the movie is trying to suggest that this is real American entrepreneurialism — the best kind.