Excess Is Boring, Especially When It's Three Hours Long

Rating: 5/10 (9 January 2014)

Martin Scorsese at his undisciplined worst.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" is 90 minutes of glib satire stretched over an interminable 180 minute film. I get it, I get it -- the excess of the film itself matches the excess of the Wall Street world depicted in it. But excess, both as a subject matter and as a style, is boring after a while. The first hour or so of the film blows the roof off the joint, and I was sure I was experiencing a film that would go down as one of Scorsese's best. But as it went on and on, and Leonardo DiCaprio's performance became more and more histrionic, and the film made the same point over and over, I had that depressing feeling that comes when a movie you're really enjoying makes a wrong turn and becomes one you really dislike.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" is of course critic proof. Anyone who doesn't like it is instantly categorized by its fan boys as stodgy and unable to handle the subject matter, as if it's an impossibility that someone could dislike the film simply because they don't think it's any good. Whatever. It's an overblown mess, stupid when it's trying to be funny (the Quaalude scene, for example) and in desperate need of someone who had the balls to tell one of America's greatest directors that he was letting his material run away with itself.
Grade: C