So I saw 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Shia LaBeouf's stock has just gone up with his taking on a big role in this sequel to Wall Street (1987). Actually, labelling the movie a 'sequel' doesn't do it justice. 'Sequel' is nowadays synonymous to uncalled-for-but-what-gives. Wall Street part two, on the other hand, is very much called for.

Director Oliver Stone captured the greed of the 1980s in Wall Street, which features Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen as Gekko's protégé Bud Fox. The movie was released in the States in December 1987, only two months after Black Monday, which was a coincidence that played nicely into the movie's hands to make it all the more relevant.

Two decades later, Wall Street greed cost us the 2008 global financial crisis and in the States people were even talking about a second Great Depression. And so came the perfect time for Stone to bring out Gekko once more.

It's 2001 and he's just been released out of jail where he's done time for insider trading. As he steps out of the gate, nobody's there to welcome him.

Fast forward ahead some years, right to the verge of the crisis. LaBeouf's Jake Moore is a young Wall Street guy who works for ageing Wall Street heavyweight Louis Zabel (Frank Langella). The two share a mentor-protégé bond; in fact, Zabel's almost like a father to Moore.

Apparently, Wall Street likes its old masters to take care of its young and hungry: at some point, Wall Street shark Bretton James (Josh Brolin) makes an attempt to take Moore under his wings, who in turn rather seeks counsel from Gekko. And James too – ruthless and confident as he may be – answers to somebody, namely Jules Steinhardt (Eli Wallach), who enjoys a Yoda-like status in the Wall Street universe.

So just you don't forget where all this is taking place, Stone takes shots of Manhattan that soar high above rooftops and helipads of skyscrapers before they plunge down to dizzying effect. The analogy should be obvious, as is Moore and James' need for speed.

Look forward to a cameo by Sheen as Fox. It's as if he's just walked off the set of Two and a Half Men as his Fox grins to Gekko while balancing a babe on each arm. Fox seems to point up Gekko's own maxim: "It's not about the money – it's about the game."

(Running time: 133 minutes)

So I saw 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'

I've got a little theory: the longer you look forward to a movie, the smaller the pay-off will be. For instance, this is true for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005), which I looked forward to for almost a year but when it finally came out my expectations had got build up so high, it didn't stand a chance.

The same is also true for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Which was bound to happen following yours truly partaking for more than a year in the online buzz surrounding this follow-up to Transformers (2007).

Transformers hit me like a train because the hype preceding it largely escaped me, and when it hit theatres my enthusiasm was very much intact; I had after all no expectations, I went in with a clean sheet. With ROTF I left crumbs of my enthusiasm with every post I made online, so when the movie hit theatres it was pretty much chipped away at.

ROTF picks up where Transformers left two years after. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is off to college, he's in love with high school sweetheart Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), and everything is peaches and cream until he lays hands on and touches a stray fragment of the Cube and starts to see strange symbols projected inside his head. Separately, a special combat unit which, with the help of the Autobots, has been searching and destroying stray Decepticons on planet Earth, learns about the presence of the Fallen (Megatron's superior). The two subplots intertwine when it is identified that the symbols are key to identifying the location of an ancient energy-generating machine which the Fallen yearns to posses for his schemes and which, if activated, would use up our Sun as fuel.

The movie's tonal feel has a Saturday-morning-cartoon quality to it, which I assume is the only quality you want to strive for in a movie that is based on a Saturday morning cartoon. On a critical note: there's too much stuff going on. The action scenes, the explosions are rather numbing and take away from the funny and the magic that made Transformers Transformers. Considering that even Two-Face in The Dark Knight (2008) felt excessive, ROTF could certainly do with less.

Bigger is not always better.

(Running time: 150 minutes)

So I saw 'Eagle Eye'

It's a Tom Clancy's with a science-fiction twist. There's no comic relief (!) and no breather as the action is non-stop. The action, though, isn't there for the sake of blowing things up or having high-speed car chases; it serves to drive the story forward.

Shia LaBeouf carries the movie with natural ease it seems and his (adventurous, backpacking to Indonesia, Bali ;)) Jerry Shaw character is cool and poignant and shares a degree of chemistry with Michelle Monaghan's 'Female'. Billy Bob Thornton is stern as the sceptical, no-nonsense, old-school FBI agent.

My wish, however, is for the movie to be taken a step or two further to realize its full potential.

(Running time: 118 minutes)