Unfettered excess in all its' exhilaration and disgust

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2014)

Very, very interesting film, the makers trying to do for Wall Street what they already did for the Mafia. And much like Goodfellas it is both absorbing and repellent at the same time, in a way we envy theses characters, they are the 'movie stars with (financial) muscle'. In every other way we are utterly repulsed by them and all the fast cars, booze/drugs and easy sex with hot bimbos in the world doesn't make up for the sheer vulgarity and nihilism of people for whom enough really never is enough in every sense of the words. Their office seems a nice place to work in some ways, strippers and marching bands in their underwear as a weekend treat but hellish in others, the fact that the financial magazine does a hatchet job article on the boss only to turn him into a hero for the unapologetically greedy is very telling.
Great performance from Leo DiCaprio showing (alongside his role in J Edgar)that he can play a great deal more than just the pretty boy hearthrob of Titanic. Jonah Hill is also fantastic and it shows a great deal of courage on his behalf to play such an infinitely dislikeable character with practically no redeeming features whatsoever. Lovely to see Joanna Lumley too, effortlessly bringing some refined British class to all this brashness, very different to her last role as the comical Dutch receptionist in Eurotrip.
Criticisms? It goes on far, far too long, there was obviously so much source material they just didn't know what to discard, you could carve out whole sections without losing any of the story. It's also hard to know where we stand on this all, the central character seems to be just fine with it all in the end and the FBI investigator seems to be the one having second thoughts of his lost opportunity.
So a good film but a little too OTT.