Overlong, misjudged attempt to make 'Goodfellas On Wall Street'

Rating: 3/10 (4 September 2015)

Starts nicely enough despite being uncomfortably close to Goodfellas in many aspects. Leonardo DiCaprio channels his best Ray Liotta, sounding uncannily similar in his voice-over monologues, and even looks a bit like Liotta's Henry Hill in some scenes. However the pace was snappy, Christian Bale's early cameo as a coked up trader was amusing, and I thought I might be in for an entertaining ride.
That all stopped about 20 minutes in when the whole thing decided to become a crude, unsubtle, endlessly shouty, unfunny, painfully obvious, overlong mish-mash of nothingness that (much like its own protagonist) absolutely reeked of having too much money thrown at it. Pure overkill. There is no magic of cinema in this film, just endless repetition of a theme. It's not even clear if the whole wall street lifestyle of excess and selfishness on display is being lampooned, celebrated, or neither. And it needed to be clearer, because TWOWS simply isn't anywhere near sharp or clever enough to successfully tread that particular tightrope of contextual ambiguity. It turned into a case of what am I watching and why should I care? The only stars this gets are for the promising first 20 minutes or so, after that it's a self indulgent mess that never ends.