Hard to watch.

Rating: 5/10 (12 May 2014)

The Great Gatsby is based on the film in the 70s of the same name and a novel, which was mediocre to begin with so there was no reason to be highly invested in this movie. But since time has passed since the last film you expect them to learn from their mistakes and make a better movie overall.
Plus I am always eager to see a Leonardo DiCaprio film, he in my honest opinion is a thrill to watch and always puts on fantastic performances. Since he was the front and center of the Great Gatsby, I was highly anticipated to watch this movie. But unfortunately I was let down, not by his performance but the overall movie.
Leonardo actually does the best he can and plays his character well, the movie overall however is not laid out well at all in my opinion. Leon will grasp your attention and make you pay attention the scenes he is in. Toby Maguire on the other hand was OK as the narrator of the plot but he was not doing anything astounding, I actually liked him in his role in Sam Raimi's Spiderman series, but Toby as the narrator here did not do anything special. The rest of the cast was fine, Carey Mulligan was OK, I actually really liked Joel Edgerton character in a antagonistic sort of way unfortunately his role was not extended he might have uplifted this movie with his good performance.
The setting was captured well they showed how the rich people back then lived their life. It is one of the positives of this movie.
The movie starts out SO slow, and it is not until 30-40 mins that you see Leo and then things SLIGHTLY pick up from there but even after that the whole movie feels cliché and the plot/narrative still doesn't interest me much, it is a love story, of a how far a man would go for a woman, touching for some, but I was not really astounded by it, mainly because the movie has too many songs in between scenes and those songs are not really good and only distract the viewer on the narrative, they just seem filler and go on too long. What was the point of that? To add more extra time to the movie? To drag out the plot which could have been told better in half the time?
Gatsby's back-story and the mystery behind him was something i was interested in knowing and was invested in but they took SO long to reveal it that by that time I did not care.
The Great Gatsby just like the novel is a mediocre affair, if they had tweaked things in the novel to make for better cinema I would have been all for it, plus reducing the number of unnecessary dance and party could have helped the narrative a lot and would have uplifted this movie. Unfortunately what we get is a long slow and mostly boring film which is just a mediocre affair and hard to watch.
Overall Rating: 5/10.