Exploration of excess

Rating: 6/10 (4 April 2017)

You could be forgiven for experiencing a little deja vu when watching THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, Martin Scorsese's true-life tale of an innocent stockbroker who rose through the ranks to become one of the most notorious figures of the 1980s, a man whose name was synonymous with excess and devious money-making. In essence this film could be described as WALL STREET with added sleaze, or SCARFACE with a Wall Street backdrop.
The familiarity of the story, and the chronological approach it takes to telling it, is very familiar to anybody who knows Scorsese's gangster classics such as GOODFELLAS or even CASINO. The whole rise-and-fall thing feels extremely predictable me, so much so that Scorsese doesn't really have much to say here. Instead, he goes all-out in his depiction of 1980s excess, filling his film with profanity (nearly 600 uses of the 'f' word), explicit sexuality, drug-taking, and general bad behaviour. As with the rest of Scorsese's films, the end result is entirely watchable, if superficial in this instance.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives a typically good performance as this film's protagonist, successfully convincing us of his transformation into a jaded, drug addicted figure. Jonah Hill is his second-in-command, although I found his performance one-note and he was trying too hard to be funny throughout. The best performers, like Jon Bernthal, have smaller parts although they do stand out in them. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is certainly well-shot and entertaining enough, and there are some stand-out sequences, like the bit where DiCaprio is unable to walk. In the end, though, it feels very slight, a comedy with a lot of laughs and general outrageousness, but nothing we haven't seen done before, and done better.