Grade: C
Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street had a very strong beginning, including a terrific cameo by Matthew McConaughey, and Jonah Hill is one of the unsung heroes of Hollywood these days, but it didn’t take long for this Scorcesean symphony to start repeating the same notes, and it became an overlong, overblown, over-acted turkey. The movie started feeling like a big commercial or pre-opening-credits intro, and before the halfway point (or probably not long after the first hour) is when I stopped caring one single solitary whit for these over-the-top nightmarish caricatures. Underdeveloped, too: I intensely disliked that after one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where the wife has Pregnant Belly, other than a couple of passing references, I don’t think we ever SEE Child #2. Later, when she comes running to Di Caprio in tears to tell him a family member of hers has died, I half-expected her to say the baby got smothered by a ton of canned soup and that’s why we never heard from it. Almost all films I’ve seen about money-grubbing stockbrokers have completely missed the yacht by not telling the story I really want to see. Rather than be laboriously taken through the facts and events of the plot, I’m more interested in the drug of money, and how it makes these people feel. It’s not as satisfying to know what happens as it is to know why it happens.
Grade: C
Film Reviews by Mark 
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