I'm a sucker for movies that use character narration to tell a story because you are basically being told the story verbatim and getting inside of the character's head to know exactly what he is thinking. There are good narrated movies and bad ones.
The Wolf of Wall Street was on the good side, but the movie isn't perfect. For starters, the movie is just way too long. When it was finally over, I was shocked to see that it had run a full 3 hours. Even though I knew it wsa long, I figured it had to be around 2 1/2 at most. Like I said, it's a good movie, but normally to make it easier to sit that long, you have to have a likable character, which
Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is surely not. Sure, he is charismatic and has a way with words. But he knows what he is doing is wrong and he doesn't give a f*ck. Kind of hard to get on board with a rich, coked out douche out for the almighty buck. There is no way to relate to him as a person or a character for me.
I really dug the cast, particularly
Jonah Hill. He is damn funny in the role (unintentionally) and steals every scene he is in. I didn't know that
Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau or
Kyle Chandler were even in this and they were great. I thought
Matthew McConaughey had a big part to play in the film. Turns out he had the shortest amount of screen time of anyone. But it was
Margot Robbie that had me scratching my head trying to place her face. It was literally when writing this review that it finally hit me that she was in
Pan Am, which ironically was the last thing I saw her in. Damn, that girl has an amazing body. Yowwza! As great as the cast was, the real star is of course
Martin Scorsese. He never fails to amaze me in his ability to craft an impressive looking film. Now I don't think it's up there with the likes of
GoodFellas or
C a s i n o , but it's nothing to sneeze at. Definitely worth a
Rent.
FYI, it wasn't until I saw the infomercials near the end of the movie did I finally remember where I had seen the real
Jordan Belfort. There was a time when all that was playing were his infomercials on TV here.