Not Amongst Scorsese's Best, but still a Good Movie

Rating: 7/10 (9 December 2015)

This is a well crafted film and displays the many frequent qualities seen in the Scorsese style. The structure of this film is very clever and intricate despite the basic story following the same structure and characters arcs found in both Casino and Goodfellas. The leading men of all three films seems to following the same exact arc with slight variations in each. The film, while well constructed, is often tough to watch. The only line of dialogue I can endorse by anyone in the film is when Rob Reiner's character says "This is obscene" in response to seeing how Jordan Belfort and his hooligans live. I don't usually find issue with the qualities that give films like this an R rating but I found that this film was celebration of these people that are simply despicable. The film glorifies the excess of drugs, sex, and criminal stupidity. Of course the performances are good all over the board and all the actors do great work with the horribly unlikeable characters they represent. The film has extreme tonal inconsistency and seems unfocused on what the film is trying to accomplish. I found myself taken out of the story due to the many tangents and subplots that the film explores entirely for the reason of making the audience laugh. The movie is funny but became extremely distracting due to the unfocused layout of events. The movie is 3 hours long in a film that feels like at least 2 and a half hours of sex and drugs along. While the film is well crafted for what it is I would recommend it only to a very particular audience that is comfortable for the very adult and graphic nature of the imagery and the dialogue.