Excessive in style, lacking in substance

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2013)

When the final cut spun in some back room, I wonder what Scorsese thought he had here, a comedy, a thriller, a drama. This movie has a little bit of everything, but the sum of its parts adds up to very little. Very little that we as movie goers have not already seen 100 times before and nothing that I necessarily needed to sit through 168 minutes to see again.
The lack of a conscience, the drive to make money at all costs, these are things we all already associate with Wall Street. So when Leo takes his messed up principles and quickly turns his smooth talking ways into millions of dollars, the audience says to itself, OK, now what? How will the story turn dark, how will the greed and booze catch up to these guys, because it always does, right.
Wrong. The plot here floats at the surface to allow the merry pranksters of Leo and Jonah Hill to basically do whatever it is they want throughout the entire movie. The parties and intoxication are normally something I love, its fun to watch people party and do drugs (at least for me). Here, the excess becomes tiresome, and that would be fine, if the film was intended to show the perils of excess. But that's not the intent, the negative effects of the drugs is touched upon, and as the plot slowly veers toward the end for our wild wall street bunch, the drugs naturally move the plot deeper down the rabbit hole, but its too much after awhile and thus the film becomes a caricature of itself. A comedic display of excess that the viewer may enjoy like an exaggerated drawing, but not something that has any staying power.
Scorsese may have realized this, so the plot meanders through FBI investigations, ship wrecks off the coast of Italy and Swiss Bank fraud. Its the classic example of throwing too much at the window and hoping something sticks. I found the plot to be unnecessarily bloated, I found the story to be largely superficial, and I found the actual direction to not be nearly as good as Scorsese's past films.
Leo and Jonah are fantastic, some of the bit actors are good, but there is no real story here. It's just a party with consequences that do not seem to bother the characters and therefore, never really create any tension in the narrative. Its an enjoyable film at best, a plodding, repetitive, shell of a movie at worst. You be the judge.