Even when you have everything, you still want more

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2014)

It is difficult to watch a movie that you absolutely know how it will end. Scorsese is known for casting Leo diCaprio as the young energetic underdog that gets the world, only to lose it wholesale. The other movies of this sort, though, were interesting because they featured the criminal underworld or some other bizarre and exotic environment. The Wolf..., in comparison, is a movie about spammers and thieves that get drunk and high all the time in order to keep up with their own fantasies about their lives. Really, you could make it about Romanian hackers and it would have been a much better and fun film, with the same general ideas.
Even worse for this three hour movie, Matthew McConaughey appears in a tiny role at the start of the film and explains it all: you don't want to make money for the client, you want to keep him betting on stocks, getting fabulously rich - on paper, while you get hard cash from commissions. The basic trade that we are supposed to empathize with is phone spamming and conning greedy and uninformed clients.
The money that gets generated for the stock traders "more than we knew what to do with" doesn't go into "diversification", doesn't go into growing the people that until then were hungry bastards looking to pay their mortgage, it isn't invested into anything. It just goes on expensive cars, yachts, prostitutes, drugs and trophy wives. And while I admit many people would sell their soul to get to the point where they can do that, the outcome of such a behavior is obviously not good if that is all you do.
And I am not being moralizing here. Hell, screw the bitches and snort the dope, but do something with yourself, plan for when the money will not be so good, make sure you will never get screwed over by technicalities, government agents, false friends or accidents. Instead the characters in the film act like there is no tomorrow. Literally they behave like the end of the world is around the corner. For three hours. It quickly gets old.
There is some value in the ending, when DiCaprio's character is terrified he is going to get to jail, only to discover than when you have money, it isn't that bad at all, but other than that I just wanted to see the film end. There is no cat and mouse game with the FBI, nothing comes as a surprise, it just goes on and on with how wonderful it is to have enough money to spend it stupidly when you earn it by praying on people even more stupid than yourself.
Bottom line: while DiCaprio makes a good role - after all, he is a damn good actor - the film itself is only mildly entertaining. Considering it is based on an autobiographical book, you might forgive the film for being too real and too boring, but there is still the matter of why someone would choose to make a movie on such a material. I watched the film with two other people and they were both awed by the opulence depicted in the film and the comparison of their own lives to that of the protagonists. I guess there is that; learn that if you are ingenious enough, hungry enough, you can make yourself have all the money in the world. Perhaps Scorsese wanted this, or perhaps he missed the point with me, because all I felt when the film was over is that I am happy with my life and I am glad the movie finally ended.
It is interesting to read about Jordan Belfort, that's a real person. Also, his story is told in another movie from 2000, called Boiler Room, with Giovanni Ribisi and Vin Diesel. Might be worth a look.