Two stars. Rating: R, for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive profanity and drug use, and some violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.13
Boobs, blow and bad language.
That’s my takeaway, from the 180
minutes I wasted — nay, endured — while watching The Wolf of Wall Street.
 |
| This is where Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) feels the most comfortable, and the most powerful: at the microphone in front of his troops at Stratton Oakmont, preparing to deliver another do-or-die speech designed to encourage everybody to hit the phones and fleece ever more working-class suckers out of their hard-earned savings. |
Root-canal surgery would have
been less painful.
Director Martin Scorsese and star
Leonardo DiCaprio have made beautiful music on numerous occasions, but this
symphony of wretched excess plays more like a botched rehearsal.
There isn’t more than 20 minutes’
worth of actual narrative in Terence Winter’s sloppy excuse for a screenplay.
Indeed, this plays like the parody sketch Saturday Night Live might have made
of a much better movie ... or, perhaps, the Mad Magazine take on far superior
material.
Great, expansive chunks of this
bewildering project could have come from the improvisational, goof-laden antics
of a Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow farce. Pointless exchanges of inane,
profanity-laden, frat boy “dialogue” go on and on and on and on. Our stars seem
to make stuff up from one scene to the next, pretending that frenzied hysteria
is some reasonable substitute for actual acting, with Scorsese apparently
content to let the camera roll.
That sort of babbling slapstick
nonsense wears thin very quickly ... and yet it continues for what seems an
eternity.
I want those three hours of my
life back.
Winter’s script is adapted from
Jordan Belfort’s 2007 “memoir” of the same title, a book that can be called
laughably unreliable at best, perniciously self-aggrandizing at worst. Belfort
was yet another opportunistic Wall Street swindler who made the most of the
high-flying 1990s, largely by defrauding investors with penny stocks via the
“prestigious” brokerage firm front of Stratton Oakmont.
He was indicted for securities
fraud and money laundering in 1998, investors having lost somewhere north of
$200 million. Belfort served just shy of two years in federal prison, then
re-invented himself as a “motivational speaker” and wrote the aforementioned
book — and a sequel, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street — mostly to revel in
the notoriously bad behavior he and his colleagues enjoyed while fleecing the
unwary.
Actually, he’s the perfect egotistical
show-off for the share-all Facebook generation.
