The Two Wolves of Hollywood

Rating: 1/10 (15 February 2014)

I have never reviewed anything, but this was so bad, I had to start! How a potentially educative "cautionary tale" in the capable hands of a respected director could go SO wrong, I don't know. I came to watch hoping that financial literacy was going to be meaningfully imparted in the form of a cinematic cultural artifact. I left knowing that Scorsese ad DiCaprio are con-men shills of a gross, greedy system themselves.
That Wolf is nominated for 5 Oscars and highly ranked on this site just makes me suspect that much of the $100 M went to pay rate-farms in Indonesia because it sure didn't go toward making a film of any discernible quality. There is no other explanation.
This film was 3-hours of the most clichéd B-roll of snow blowing, hookers, suitcases of cash, implants, pool parties, peroxide etc. scrounged from the editing room floor of a rap video from the 90s. With white people. Only worse: it wasn't even entertaining! At least 2 Live Crew kept it down to a couple of minutes. The Wolf on Wall Street, with its lack of meaning, lack of character development, or plot beyond what was obvious, had no excuse to drag on as long as it did.
Like in a stripclub, one is desensitized to the in-your-face porn antics within minutes. But in this film, the viewer is psychologically bludgeoned with montage after montage of flabby bodied, unerotic, un-interesting party scenes because the filmmakers had no other creative tools to convey the trouble with excess or debauchery, except to literally show it over and over. As for the other parts of the film, my masochism musta been what got me through the reels of tedious un-funny, un-stimulating, dialogue, schticks and Jonah-Hill-isms.
Except maybe the little girl who plays the daughter, who is as exhausted, and confused as we are when DiCaprio wakes her up during one of his highs to go for a drive, there is no character to care about in the film. Two thirds into it, there was almost potential to perhaps care about a woman who DiCaprio singles out in a melodramatic speech to his staff as someone who had nothing, but climbed her way up to her current Mercedes-driving, $2000 suit-wearing glory. But, we'd never seen this woman before and never did again. DiCaprio's character's own climb to the top wasn't even interestingly laid out as to why we should care. None of the cartoonish con-men ever express any other dimension of their character, other than horny, greedy or high. Matthew McConaughey's character does the equivalent of read his own bio with a wink and a smile and then disappears. The trophy wife, who we do see in varying circumstances is NOWHERE nearly as interesting as the Sharon Stone character in Casino. Here, DiCaprio marries this chick when he's rich, and then she dumps him when he's poor. So what.
When an over-the-top autobiography gets put on the big screen, by the biggest names in Hollywood, with a huge budget, that is a non-thinking formula for box-office success. Scorsese and DiCaprio sacrificed any and all interesting artistic choices for this shiny turd of a film. And for this, they cannot be trusted as true artists again. Their motive was profit at the viewer's time and expense proving they are exactly the picture of meaningless greed they purported to warn us about in this film about Wall St. And you know what? This wasn't even really about Wall St. It was about a 90s infomercial dude who is as long winded as this film is.