Entertaining but empty

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2014)

Jordan Belfort arrives in Wall Street and gets a job selling stocks over the phone. The environment is vulgar, brutal, ruthless. One of the senior guys takes him to lunch and gives him the lessons to survive. The main point is to put money from the customers in their pockets, not so much enrich their customers.
When Black Friday hits, Belfort is out of a job, and ends up working at a company of amateurs selling penny stocks. He does so well that he ends up opening his own firm ripping people off. He hires friends and shady characters. One of them introduces him to drugs. They are so wildly successful that they pretty much don't know what to do with all their money. He becomes addicted to money, power, and all drugs he can get his hands on. His wife divorces him and he marries the gorgeous Naomi.
As the feds start snooping around his business, which involves everything illegal under the sun, he decides to move his money to a Swiss bank and Naomi's English aunt helps in the process as well as various carriers who transport millions of cash by hand. Eventually, the government catches up with him as his life unravels.
The Wolf of Wall Street is your typical Scorsese "rise and fall of a bad guy" movie. It's a bit different in so far as Belfort is nowhere near as likable as the other Scorsese main characters. Here you are not wishing for Belfort to escape and get away. You want him to face justice. And violence has been replaced with comedy. Much of this overlong movie is made up of comedy skits basically. There's DiCaprio on drugs, DiCaprio having deranged sex, there's DiCaprio fooling his wife into doing naughty things in front of a hidden camera, there's the company jerks throwing little people at a target, etc, etc. This movie could have easily been cut by at least half an hour. There's also not nearly enough drama.
Most disappointing is the lack of any sort of moral message, if you will. It shouldn't have been difficult to point out the insane misantrophy of Wall Street folks. But there's only very little of that. Given that the finance world still gets away with murder, or perhaps these days even more so, it's not clear why Winter, Scorsese, the producers, anyone, was not interested in taking the opportunity to scold the finance world.
Acting is OK. DiCaprio is strong except for the scenes where he's motivating his employees. There are too many scenes of those and DiCaprio doesn't convey the charisma necessary. Margot Robbie is the revelation here. I'm not crazy about the rest of the cast- Hill in particular doesn't convince.
Like all stories about larger than life personalities written by themselves, much probably didn't happen as told. Nevertheless and despite the excessive lengthy, Wolf of Wall Street is entertaining yet surprisingly and unnecessarily superficial.