Waste of a movie which in fact had had to much potential to be a perfect one.

Rating: 3/10 (30 April 2015)

I just wonder what big deal it is shooting a movie as long as 3 long hours when you do not have much of a story to tell. Do they sell tickets with higher prices when the movie is longer, forcing 2 and even more time of debauchery scenes on people? By doing so, they end up having a boringly slow-paced movie without telling anything. One gets tired of going over and over the same thing again and again, waiting for the original story to start which doesn't seem to come until after at least one and half hour through the movie. And when you start to think it is finally there, it doesn't take much time to realize that the same crap comes back after only some minutes of a real story. That's when you lose much of your hope and patience for the movie.
The whole story is about a man, Jordan Belford (Leonardo DiCaprio) with little to no moral values becoming rich by stock fraud defrauding people of their hard-won money. They could have comfortably told that the men and his crooks are people without moral values at most in 30 minutes. They could have used the other time displaying how he grew up dreaming becoming rich, what jobs he had had before either out of the stock market or in it, but before having his own business, how he started the the stock broker business, what lows and highs he had in the business, the response of and impact of big stock broker companies, their competition, maybe threats, partnership offers and especially how he had the attention of law enforcement agencies, his trial, his defense, the verdict on him, how his victims financially suffered because of their engagement with him, etc.. Real parts from Jordan's real life and/or some fiction added on it.
The thing is the producer and the director seems to not have really felt like having a story with many interesting parts developed over time and flowing with an acceptable pacing. They must have thought that people just would expect to watch a lot of debauchery and would get excited about that only. I think the not deserved high rating of the movie is because mostly people who are interested in this part voted for it here. Yet, the rating of a movie doesn't give you much of an idea whether you will like it or not. Because your liking is shaped according to your own interests, not others' even if the others are a large group of people.
The bad thing here is they didn't have to have this movie title and this movie topic which reminds people of the stock broker and finance businesses to shoot this. If they had got a relevant movie title and movie topic, only people who are interested in lots of debauchery and vulgar language would have watched it and so much less people would have spoken negatively on it. When you have a financial feeling in your movie title and movie topic, lots of more serious movie buffs who are interested in a serious and interesting story on the business world would go watch it. Plus, they wouldn't have minded some humor in it as long as it supports and pushes the original story development and enables you to have some fun as well.
Now as for my rating; not 1, but 3 for two reasons: 1. Energetic and convincing acting from main protagonists starting with Jordan and his inspirational speeches to his employees (ignoring that he is inspiring not for a respectful cause, but fraud. 2. Even though limited, the questioning of Jordan by law enforcement officials and interesting conversing between the two sides including the one in his yacht.
Spoiler for such a short scene from here (no general insight on how the story goes): I would like to touch down on one short scene which is interesting and which tells a lot about fraudsters' minds. In the scene; during the interaction between Jordan and one of his female employees, Jordan tells her he gave her an advance a few times more than she asked for when she first started the job, because he believed in her. There appears to be good chemistry between the two there and both seem moved. And Jordan then turns to his crowd of employees and tell them all that he also believes each and every one of them. All of them seem moved and become emotional. Watching this scene, I could not help but think that there might be people in this world who so do not mind their illegal activity of cheating people of billions of their hard-won money to the extent that they are able to pretend they are not really even aware that what they are proud of and moved for is really nothing other than cheating and deceiving people, enriching themselves with average people's hard-won money. They pretend and can even delude themselves that they are decent working people with moral values. More and more of such scenes which would make you think about different aspects of life and the business, finance world would have made the movie much more interesting.