A desperate Oscar grab

Rating: 6/10 (19 December 2013)

It's unfortunate; I came into this movie with such high expectations that was sustained through the first 30 min of the movie, crashing right after in similar fashion to the stock market crash of the early 80s.
You see, it's very similar to Goodfellas in it's narrative format. That aside, the movie is loosely tied by a plot reminiscent of Casino, holding together episodes of pointless bantering and ridiculous debauchery. The debaucherous episodes are fun, but the gratuitous sex and drug scenes honestly get tiring after awhile, since it seems they ran out of any compelling plot points.
I expected Jonah Hill to be a little funnier. I sighed every time Leo was about to give a speech, I could see himself trying to hearken to Gordon Gekko's style of speech yet with a veinier more expletive filled delivery. Leo gave too many speeches. He hammed it up unnecessarily. At one point he went Daniel Day Lewis level type retarded and it became very clear this was the most disappointing "try hard" attempt for an Oscar I had seen outside of "I am Sam".