Loan Wolf

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2014)

Against my better judgment I gave this one a whirl and though it passed the time that's really all it did. By and large Scorcese is a one-trick pony and that one trick is not just celebrating but building a monument to excess; nine times out of ten the excess takes the form of violence often with Robert de Niro mistaking psychotic ranting for acting, no doubt encouraged by Scorcese. This time around the excess on display is more or less everything except violence by which I mean sex, drugs, booze and leave us not forget excessive money-making, or, to put it another way, making more money that it's possible to spend so that the addiction is just to the physical act of making money not by digging ditches, punching a clock, selling haberdashery but by conning already gullible people into parting with money for shares in joke companies. You can lay out the premise in one sentence, let alone a whole paragraph so why they devoted three hours to it is anyone's guess unless, of course, they had an image of Oscar pinned up on the set.