Greed is good.

If you watched the previews for “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” you may have an idea in your head that the movie is about Gordon Gekko’s return to power. Well, it is and it isn’t.

The entire movie is very slow and doesn’t really have a lot of rising to power. It is mostly a story about how corrupt people can be. Not a terrible premise whatsoever, but the hangup occurs with its delivery. You see, it’s kinda dull.

The pace is very slow and the builds don’t seem to peak; on top of that, the buildups are only giving way to very obvious outcomes.

Michael Douglas does a fine job reprising his role of Gekko — I mean, it has to be pretty good; he did win an Oscar for it. Unfortunately, you get to see little of Douglas in the beginning of the film, and as for the rest of the picture, he still doesn’t get a whole lot of screen-time.

Shia LeBeouf is the leading man, and he doesn’t do a terrible job, but he is no Douglas. LeBeouf’s character is not flamboyant, not over-the-top, not devious, not charismatic — it’s just plain; plain but fine.

Personally, I didn’t mind it, as that was really what the character was supposed to be. Too bad that was part of the reason the movie had such poor execution.

Taking the rest of the screen-time was Carey Mulligan as Gekko’s estranged daughter. She did a great job with the role. Again, though, it’s too bad it’s that very sentimentality that makes “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” so slow.

Really, the bad thing about the movie is the lame love story. Love is a great plot device, but when I think of Gekko I want to see a story about power and influence and little regret and the willingness to sacrifice it all to be on top. What I don’t really want to see is a movie about family overriding the aforementioned compelling concepts.

Now, this doesn’t ruin the film, but it makes it into something that is only a slightly worthwhile watch, and only really good if you stretch your imagination with a truly Machiavellian take on the extremely subtle and possibly nonexistent long con that Gekko put together in jail — and I’m not talking about just his money. I’m talking about a calculated process that requires explanation like an episode of “Lost.”

I will give the film credit for taking me back to the 1980s. The way Oliver Stone directs the movie took me right back to the mindset of the time Gekko first appeared in, despite the actual movie being set in recent times.

I guess what it all comes down to is this: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is too slow and base for audiences today to really get into, and even if they did, they’d still leave wanting more.

Catch this one on video or at the dollar theater, but only if you’ve got little else to do and nothing else to watch that day.