"The Wolf of Wall Street" makes corporate sociopathy a lot of fun to watch

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2015)

"The Wolf of Wall Street" opens with Wall Street scumbag Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Dicaprio) bragging about his superhuman drug intake, his insatiable appetite for hookers, and the fortunes he has made from tricking suckers into buying worthless stocks. And then he tells us he is better than the rest of us peons.
"Money makes you a better person," he says. "Solve your problems by getting rich."
Like any good huckster, he knows how to play our emotions. One minute, it's like he's daring us to hate him, strutting around as if he owns the world. The next, he beckons us to join him in his selfishness... and we do, against our own better judgment, because he makes sleaze look so satisfying. "The Wolf of Wall Street" takes us into his world, and it's one hell of a ride: corporate intrigue, orgiastic parties, and drug-fueled madness that would make Hunter S Thompson proud. "The Wolf of Wall Street" revels in greed, amorality and decadence... and it's damn near perfect.
Belfort's rise and fall during the greed-fueled Wall Street of the '80s is a perfect story for Martin Scorsese: he's at his best when portraying life in the criminal underworld. Here, he makes white-collar crooks just as fascinating as the Mafiosi in "Goodfellas" and "Casino". He empathizes with Belfort and his fellow Masters of the Universe, and lets us get to know (if not like) them.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Scorsese's best leading man since Robert De Niro, and here he gives an absolutely fearless performance as a man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. DiCaprio's Belfort isn't a lost lamb led astray by excess - he is just a rotten human being. DiCaprio makes Belfort both repugnant and perversely likable: he gives him a con artist's cocky charm and effortless salesmanship, so we like him even when we see him at his worst. (His worst involves scamming his clients, hitting his wife and leading his employees in a game of "midget-tossing".)
The rest of the cast is top-notch as well. Jonah Hill is hilarious as Belfort's weaselly right-hand man, playing him as a rutting, grunting bag of unrestrained appetites. Margot Robbie is both sexy and slimy as Belfort's trophy wife, who is in her own way as much of a con artist as he is. Matthew McConoughey, as Belfort's drug-addled mentor, gives a performance of inspired, lightbulb-battered moth craziness; despite only being on screen for six minutes, he injects a wild, improvisational energy that we miss after he's gone.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" is not for people who like to see movies where good prevails and everything is all right in the end. There is no moral, no life-affirming lesson to be learned. Bad people simply do bad things, in part for the money, but mostly for the sheer hell of it. But it's a testament to Scorsese's talent that this cynical, black-hearted movie is great fun to watch, and one of the more intelligent satires to come to movie theaters in a long time.