Showing the extravagant and decadent life of Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street is a 3 hours advertisement on why you should not do drugs, and nothing else.
The world of corruption has always been a huge topic in cinema, and I guess it’s that time again where a great director plunges into this aspect of the financial world. I have to admit, you don’t have time to catch your breath with this movie, everything is fast and all up in your face, but mostly it’s very Scorsese: Beginning, of course, with DiCaprio.
As always, Leonardo DiCaprio gives an impressive and very funny performance; he proves once more that he can really do comedy (remember Catch Me If You Can people?). Jonah Hill is also great, but his part is not far from what he usually does: a somewhat funny and vulgar humor. I’d like to give a little shout out to Matthew McConaughey because for the little time he had on screen, he was my favorite. Apart from two or three comedy gold situations or moments, there isn’t much I liked about the film.
The problem is that you don’t understand why they choose to act the way they do, there isn’t one character even remotely interesting, and it is just empty. You can only see a bunch of Power addicts, messing up their lives in a big way. Not one of them accomplishes anything; they could go forward, but they don’t want to, and they get more and more messed up. The succession of scenes, each more depraved than the next, have left me bored, and kind of disgusted. It is not OK to make a three-hour long film that is as painful to watch as The Wolf of Wall Street. Not only is the writing bad, which is surprising for a Scorsese film, but he probably has given us the worse film of his career (but I haven’t seen them all so…).
Between sex, drugs, prostitutes, and a dwarf-throwing contest, I’ve actually started to wonder if they get any work done. Even more, halfway through it, I asked myself how it was possible that none of them had an overdose at one point, with all the drugs they did. By far, the worst are the reasons that we are given by the lead character throughout the movie. If you have that much power you need to screw up your life in order to function properly and damn he couldn’t be more wrong.
There’s no psychology to those characters, no morals, no regrets. Belfort is so corrupt that it is almost ridiculous. He never learns from his mistakes and repeats them over and over again. After a while of watching him go around in circles like a puppy chasing its tail, the only thing you want is for it to stop.
There’s no point to The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s nothing to learn, and at the end you only get a bitter feeling that this poor excuse for a wolf has just stolen three very long hours of your life.
(But to end on a better note, here’s a fun fact: Spike Jonze, the famous director also nominated at this year’s Oscars with his movie Her, made a cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street! Can you spot him ?)
Rating: 2/5
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