Poorly presented recycled story about enormous greediness

Rating: 3/10 (15 July 2015)

Wolf of Wall Street is one of those movies that should be great on paper. It has great director, great cast, even greater budget and based on seemingly interesting tale from real life. The clumsiness of this one, however, is almost unbearable.
The storyline follows the craziest years of the "Wall Street Wolf" named Jordan Belfort who starts to build his way up to the stock markets, starting from the so called penny business and ends up challenging the well established Wall Street stock companies. Much of this road happens to be illegal and almost exclusively amoral. It follows pretty much the classic route of these kind of movies - becoming successful and then slowly going crazy and ending up with the biggest mess.
OK, no doubt that we've seen something similar before. Probably the most similar fashion is known from the Scorcese's own Goodfellas and also, perhaps to even a bigger extent, from the Scarface. Mind you, this really isn't a point of criticism for me, because the two mentioned movies are really damn good as far as I'm concerned. The movie is extremely predictable though.
Also the Wolf of Wall Street's mafia relatives have the sense of tension from the first second - many people will be easily fascinated by the no good gangster life, but is it true about the stock brokers? Well? Of course not! Only thing interesting about it is the money and in the Wolf of Wall Street they made some. Well, pretty much actually. And spending it is something that would make people interested. Especially if it's something fancy, in your face or just illegal. This became the disguise of the mediocre script, non-existing character development and made the entire flick repetitive as hell.
The large part of the film showed coke snorting, pill swallowing, drinking and hookers. I'm not the one who has some moral dilemmas, but come on - enough is enough. For me this is one of the biggest problems of this one. Not only is this repetitive, but it also gave the feeling that the creators tried way too hard to shock the audience. This attempt became a flop pretty quickly though, but as said this probably disguises many of the weak points fairly well. At least the overall rating suggests that. The same can be said about the jokes which fell flat for the most part. These seemingly had shock value, but they just lack that something. Most dialogs in the movie are sloppy and end up nowhere. We could see some lines going on in the character's heads while in conversation. These were awful and amateurish for the most time as well, again considering what caliber the movie is supposed to have.
It takes special talent to make characters as one dimensional and unlikable. There was no one to bond with, no one to cheer for. The only small character development was with our main character, when he changed from a Wall Street freshman to an absolute douche. After that he and everybody surrounding him had only money, money, money in mind and cared for nothing and nobody. Well, Belfort played by DiCaprio did seem to be generous with his employees, but family for example didn't mean a thing for him. Almost three hours of non ending soulless malevolent hustling by the Belfort crew sure got on nerves.And there were at least four scenes where we were told how great such lifestyle was. The complete lack of the main characters moral was intended to be balanced by the father of Belfort, but the only thing he seemed to care about was the son's prostitute addiction. Drugs or illegal business was seemingly OK in daddy's eyes.
The illegal side of the whole Belfort's business should have been explained a little better as well. We saw DiCaprio explaining it quickly, but then canceled it by saying "You don't care anyway." or something like that. Another example of lazy writing. Right, let's watch some orgy instead. That fixes everything.
As critical as I've been, I'm going to say that the movie is not all terrible. Most of the jokes are rubbish, but few of these work nicely. As little as the actors had a chance to work with, most of the performances are good. I'm not too sure about this being DiCaprio's best role, but he put on a good show for sure. Also scenery is nice and seemingly flawless wherever the action is going on, but that shouldn't be too big of a surprise.
In the end this film remains a disappointment. What we have here is a recycled crime story that shows us bland Wall Street style hustling which is artificially "spiced" by the endless partying and sex scenes. This film offers nothing new or interesting. It is incredibly predictable and boring, additionally lacking any sort of character development or interesting plot twist. I just feel this movie was incredibly needless, at least the way it was served. Finally I'll have to admit that with all the hype surrounding it, I had actually really high expectations, but The Wolf of Wall Street failed to deliver.