Did Scorsese realise that most fans of this movie celebrate and admire the characters?

Rating: 1/10 (8 August 2019)

Young heterosexual males make up the core audience of this film, which seems to be the main demographic of Scorsese's filmography and not much of a testament to his range. With that in mind, everything that Scorsese would claim he wanted to show as a vice is in fact celebrated as a virtue by the movie's audience and this is why the film fails in my opinion. Unlike the masterful "American Psycho" which superbly presented this particular environment as ridiculous and used humour at the expense of its characters, Scorsese seems to craft "Wolf of Wall Street" in a way that makes men in the audience want to identify with the roles and emulate the behaviour. It gives me a sickening feeling that so much money went into a movie so devoid of intelligence and humanity... even "Goodfellas" had redemption in the sense that Liotta's narration was portrayed as jaded... no such luck here, with the smug and smarmy DiCaprio setting the tone for everyone else's performance. This film is the biggest moneymaker of Scorsese's career but I feel he really lost all integrity as an artist for making it. It's just an excuse to make an excessive, lurid fantasy film for men under the guise of being a morality tale. It tells us nothing, it offers us nothing. It is hollow and toxic.