Isn’t going to work every day wonderful? Getting up early in the morning, squashing yourself into a train full of flatulent commuters and then spending most of the day answering badly written, poorly thought-out emails. But things were even worse in the 80s. Back then you had to write letters and back then you didn’t have the consolation of an ipod on your trip home - your shuffles were only 60 minutes long, you had to switch sides halfway through and Westlife had yet to record an album. Those were dark days.

Despite this, Wall Street begins in a very jaunty fashion. Frank Sinatra plays on the soundtrack and the trials and tribulations of the morning routine are filmed with gentle exasperation - the opening seems to exude the American belief that if you work hard enough you’ll attain a comfortable level of prickdom and will no longer have to tolerate this daily abasement.

A believer in this extremely deluded conviction is Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen. He begins the film as a low-grade stockbroker, but he thinks that if he works hard enough, if he makes enough connections and kisses enough arse, he too will have a part of the American Dream. And even though most people would receive only a handful a scraps for humiliating themselves in this fashion (a minuscule pay rise, perhaps 10 days annual paid vacation instead of 5, or if they’re really good, their own cupboard-sized office), Fox actually gets some sizeable rewards for his toadying.

Fox goes from cold-calling old fogies in a loud, sweaty office to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. And how does he do this? He does it by selling out his father.

Bud’s dad, played by Martin Sheen, works for an airline. He’s a blue-collar guy who likes to unwind after an honest, hard day’s work with a smoke and some beer. He’s the complete opposite of his white-collar son who likes nothing more than making his own pasta in his pretentious apartment with his vacuous girlfriend.

The temptation in this film is Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). He’s the Lucifer-type figure that tempts the innocent Fox to stray from the path of decency. He teaches Fox to love nothing but money and to indulge in the mindless pursuit of it. He also throws a woman his way and very quickly Fox becomes Gekko’s loyal lapdog.

Some of the funniest scenes in the film revolve around Fox’s attempts to modernise his apartment. He and his girlfriend staple some fake brickwork to a wall and then paint it to make it look rough and ready - like the plaster is peeling off the walls and exposing the brickwork underneath. It’s some of the most pretentious design I’ve ever seen but it’s presented here as desirable and cutting edge. There’s also a hilarious exchange where Daryl Hannah, who produces a performance so stunningly flat that it seems like consciousness is a foreign concept to her, says that she wants to do for furniture what Laura Ashley did for fabrics. You mean, produce horribly bland, middlebrow vomit? Yeah, fuck you.

And so it’s for these very meagre pleasures that Fox decides to sell out his father’s company and turn them over to the shark Gekko - a pretentious apartment and some vacant poontang.

It’s at this point that you realise that the film is nothing more than a blindingly obvious morality tale. What’s more important, family or money? Anyone with half a brain should know that family comes first. I mean, sure you can sell everyone out and become Donald Trump with a bowlful of Shredded Wheat on your head hawking crappy mattresses, but what kind of comfort does money provide? Well, aside from innumerable blow jobs and an endless supply of cocaine, not much.

Daddy Fox immediately sees through Gekko’s bullshit and knows that he only gives a fuck about money. Bud is a white collar prick who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, while daddy is a pure, unclouded, blue collar saint who can see the world for what it really is.

Seeing as Bud’s father is played by Martin Sheen, Charlie’s real life father, you’d think that their scenes would have some authenticity about them. You’d be thinking wrong. There’s a particularly risible scene after his father has a heart attack where Charlie can only express his emotional distress by blinking. Clearly talent skips a generation.

Still, it’s fun watching Sheen’s performance and realising that Christian Bale stole lots of Bud’s inflections for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The most fun thing about Wall Street is Gekko. Some of the crap he spews is priceless. My favourite line is, ‘If you want a friend, get a dog.’ Basically he wants people with no feelings. He’s a horrible, preposterous man, but he’s easily the most interesting thing in the film. His stupid, mindless pursuit of money represents everything that is wrong about America - the lack of feeling, the lack of compassion, the knuckleheaded belief that consumption is more important than understanding. It’s no wonder that he’s been the subject of endless parodies (Del Boy’s yuppie phase in Only Fools and Horses being the best by far).

A particularly hilarious Gekko moment is when he calls Bud early one morning to tell him how beautiful the sunrise looks from his beach. He says that no painting has ever been able to capture its beauty. His pomposity is off the chart. But what takes the scene to whole new level is that Bud seems to be having an orgasm on the other line - just look at his face; he’s lapping this crap up and spunking in his boxers.

More crap comes during Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech. He claims that he’s a liberator of companies. He claims that he’s rescuing them from bad management. He certainly has a point that managers are the bane of corporate life. Too many of them do too little for too much money. But Gekko is not a liberator. He’s an executioner. He’s there to cut everything up and take the spoils. He’s part of the destructive force of capitalism - he’s a leach that sucks the blood out of the economy; he doesn’t actually produce anything, he’s just a carpetbagger in a suit.

So the fact that Bud sees all of this but still looks up to Gekko for so long just shows what a stupid character he is. And when he finally does realise what’s going on, the film illustrates his mental anguish in the lamest way possible - Bud wakes surrounded by empty pizza boxes and wonky venetian blinds. Yeah, he’s seriously gone off the rails there.

Perhaps realising that it’s straining to come to a satisfying conclusion, the film ends with a silly fight in Central Park and then shows that Bud has set-up Gekko for prosecution (he’s been wearing a wire while Gekko makes incriminating statements). Yes, occasionally a Gekko or a Madoff gets prosecuted, but some things never change. Money never sleeps and shit always smells. (To my eternal disappointment, the title Wall Street: Shit Always Smells was rejected for the upcoming sequel.)

One thing that amazes me about Young Guns is that it must be one of the few films where the bad guy is an Irishman and the good guy is English. Surely I thought all Limeys were dastardly rapscallions. Apparently not.

But then again, read between the lines and John Tunstall (Terence Stamp) might not be all that he seems. Here’s a guy who’s come to America to make money by selling cattle and who has a group of ‘Regulators’ to make sure that no one steals from him. Seems quite reasonable, doesn’t it? But all the Regulators are young men and nearly all of them are pretty boys. I’m not suggesting that they have to bend over for their supper (well, not all the time), but I’m quite sure that Mr Tunstall spends a lot of time in his bedroom beating himself raw.

I mean, just take the dialogue between him and Doc (Kiefer Sutherland) in the opening scene when they’re in town. He says he’ll buy Doc a drink but he also instructs him not to tell the other boys. Ooh, it’ll be our secret, eh? Yeah, just like the ‘happy time’ we have together is a secret. Sssh. Don’t tell the other boys!

And then later Tunstall takes Billy (Emilio Estevez) into town and buys him some nice new threads. Talk about grooming.

But I like the fact that the film acknowledges the sexual undertones. There’s a great bit where Murphy (Jack Palance) confronts Tunstall and suggests that the Englishman might have an unhealthy interest in his Regulators. ‘Well, I’ve had you pegged as the type who likes educating young boys.’ Palance’s line delivery is excellent.

And then there’s a scene where all the Regulators have to do a bit of reading (Tunstall sits in his rocking chair, either rocking back and forth like a dirty old perv getting a sexual kick out of the readings or rocking back and forth like a benevolent father figure – it depends on how suspicious your mind is). Billy is handed the newspaper that the other boys have been reading from, and to everyone’s surprise, reads superbly. Tunstall then gets up, says well done and ruffles Billy’s hair. Billy instinctively flinches away. Maybe he too senses that Tunstall’s kindness has a price.

But thankfully the film never turns into Lolita with guns and boys, and we’re left with the assumption that Tunstall really was a great guy. Unless of course the boys all willingly proffered themselves to the Englishman, in which case you’ve got an action version of Brokeback Mountain…which would be pretty neat.

But the scene where Tunstall is murdered is rather strange. A bunch of Murphy men turn up behind him and shoot the shit out of him. Stamp then stands up in a very odd way, like someone is pulling him up from a crane. It’s a death scene that I’ve always thought was odd, even when I was a kid.

One of the many things that makes Young Guns such a supremely enjoyable film is its grim sense of humour. After the Tunstall killing, the Regulators are deputised. They’re supposed to serve eleven warrants and expose Murphy’s corruption. But instead Billy decides to go on a killing spree. The first guy, called Henry Hill, he kills in the outhouse. But what makes the scene so great is the way that Henry is killed. Both Billy and Henry are going for a piss, and Billy starts giggling when Henry lets off a massive fart, but then Billy turns around. He then shoots Henry with his gun jutting through his fly. And then while cackling like a hyena, he shoves the warrant in the dead man’s mouth and tells him he’s under arrest. Billy’s borderline psychotic, but he’s so joyful that you’re always on his side.

Another funny scene is when Billy kills Sherriff Brady. He skips behind the Sheriff and throws his hat into his path. He then steals the Sherriff’s guns and murders him in cold blood. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for hilarity, but it is.

And Billy also has a great habit of delivering Bond-like one liners. After he and the Regulators kill a couple of guys, he says, ‘Court adjourned.’ Roger Moore would be proud.

In the mouth of this madness, the only voice of reason is Dick (Charlie Sheen). He insists that the Regulators are the law and that they shouldn’t be shooting everyone up. But he’s such a joyless character, telling Billy that he isn’t Robin Hood and then later taking an age to say grace (‘Dick, it’s getting cold!’), that you know he has dead meat written across his forehead.

To show just show square Dick is, he doesn’t even join in with everyone else when they take peyote. And by the way, what a genius idea it was to have cowboys on drugs. What a glorious 80s rock ‘n’ roll Western this is.

I’m sure most people, with good reason, will most fondly remember the drug taking sequence for Dirty Steve (Dermot Mulroney) talking about his chicken, but I actually prefer the moment with Charlie (Casey Siemaszko) on the cliff. He stands there, saying, ‘This is great’ and then promptly vomits. This in itself would be glorious, but then he starts rubbing his belly. Everyone knows that wonderful feeling after a good puke where you feel like a million bucks. Therefore I can’t help but chuckle every time I see Charlie pat his stomach.

But yes, Dick doesn’t take drugs and calls the rest of the guys godless heathens. Nowadays that would mean he’d survive until the end of the film, but in an 80s film it means he’s a damn square and must die. And die he does.

Perhaps trying to outdo Stamp in the weird death stakes, Sheen gets shot by an old geezer. But instead of flying vertically upwards like Stamp, Sheen decides to nod about a million times after getting riddled with bullets. It’s like he’s become a nodding dog.

Once Billy becomes the leader of the gang, the real fun starts. And one of my favourite scenes is when he catches some guy showing off to a girl about how he’s going to kill Billy the Kid. The guy is obviously a second-rate gunman, so Billy decides to fuck with him. At the beginning Billy flatters him and then he asks to look at his pistol. And then gradually, he winds the guy up further and further, right to the point that the guy tries to shoot the Kid in the face. But Billy has taken the bullets out of the man’s gun and shoots him. Estevez then laughs his manic laugh and asks Doc how many men he’s killed. He thinks he’s killed 25. Doc tells him he’s killed 5. ‘We’ll make it 10’, says Billy, pouncing on the opportunity to build upon other people’s myths about him and turn himself into a larger than life anti-hero.

Another amusing Billy moment is when he’s in a bath dictating a letter to be sent to the Governor. After a bit of waffle he says that he surrenders. He then thinks for a moment and says, ‘PS, I changed my mind. Kiss my ass.’ I just love how maniacal the character is. He’s a real Puckish figure – he isn’t scared of anything.

Hell, Billy isn’t even scared in the final shootout when he and the Regulators end up facing the Cavalry. ‘I like these odds’, he cackles. But poor old Charlie almost shits himself. In perhaps the film’s best moment, Charlie begins crying. Billy tells him to pull himself together and Charlie then gets his courage up and starts shooting out of the window like a maniac. Billy then hoots with enjoyment and the two unload on the men outside. It’s a real rabble rousing moment.

And another reason why it works so well is because the chemistry between all the characters is excellent. You end up loving all of them. And although Billy is the most fun, it’s probably Charlie and Dirty Steve that I like the most. Charlie constantly shits himself at every opportunity, but he proves himself to be a loyal and brave fighter, and Dirty Steve comes good, too. At the beginning he’s a mealy-mouthed racist, always hacking on Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips), but at the end he dies to save the guy. The whole film is infused with the macho notion that as annoying as your friends are, you should do anything for them. And so the final sequence where a few end up dying for their pals gives the film a strange emotional kick.

And Charlie’s death, where he gets to go one on one with John Kinney, is magnificent. Like the film itself, it’s pure rock ‘n’ roll wish fulfilment. But in a film that’s full of screeching guitars and implausibly good-looking outlaws, it’s not out of place.

Oh, and the intro is one of the best things ever.