The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
★★★★ — The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Three hours of pure, uncut greed, and I loved every debauched, morally bankrupt minute of it. Well, almost every minute. We'll get to that.
What Scorsese has done here is essentially weaponise excess. This isn't a film that stands at a safe distance from the corruption it depicts, tutting disapprovingly with its arms folded. It drags you in, sits you down next to Jordan Belfort, and lets him talk directly at you until you're half-convinced you should be cold-calling strangers about penny stocks. That's the trick, and it's a brilliant one. You don't just watch how Belfort scams people. You become the person being scammed. You feel the pull of the pitch. And then, somewhere around the third act, you have to reckon with the fact that you've been grinning along with a man who has caused real, tangible harm to real people. The film never spells that out for you. It trusts you to get there yourself.
Leonardo DiCaprio is extraordinary here. I've admired him across a lot of films, including Blood Diamond, where he carries an enormous amount of moral weight. Here he does the opposite: he strips all of that away and just commits to pure, gleeful performance. Belfort isn't a man you're meant to admire, but DiCaprio makes him completely irresistible. The motivational speeches, the physical comedy, that legendary Quaalude sequence where he's essentially operating on a different plane of consciousness entirely. He's chewing scenery like it's gourmet steak and he hasn't eaten in a week. It's a towering piece of work.
Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff is the unhinged id to Belfort's calculated ego. Where Belfort at least has the veneer of a functioning human being, Donnie is chaos wearing a suit and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Hill plays it with total commitment and zero vanity, and the chemistry between the two of them drives the film's engine. Margot Robbie, meanwhile, is sharp and self-possessed as Naomi. She's not just decoration. She knows exactly who Belfort is, and she makes her choices with eyes wide open. That's more interesting than any naive love interest would have been.
Scorsese directs the whole thing like a conductor who's been told there's no ceiling on the orchestra. The editing is relentless. The dialogue comes at you fast. The camera is restless and energetic in a way that mirrors Belfort's own inability to sit still. It's a film built on momentum, and for long stretches it's almost intoxicating. You can draw a clear line from Scorsese's earlier work on films like Little Caesar (which I've written about) through the rise-and-fall gangster arc he perfected elsewhere, right to this. The DNA is consistent. The ambition, the rhythm, the refusal to moralize on your behalf.
Now. Is it too long? Yes. Genuinely, yes. At three hours, there are stretches where the repetition starts to feel less like deliberate saturation and more like the edit could have used another pass. The film makes its point about cyclical excess and then makes it again, and then makes it a third time with a different yacht. I get what it's going for, and I think the length is partly intentional, meant to exhaust you the way the lifestyle itself is exhausting. But there's a version of this that's twenty minutes shorter and tighter without losing anything essential.
That said, I don't want to dwell too long on the criticism, because what this film gets right it gets spectacularly right. The moral compass gets binned around the twenty-minute mark and never comes back, and that's a creative choice, not an oversight. It's not subtle. It was never meant to be subtle. Subtlety doesn't belong in a film where a stockbroker gets revived on the trading floor with a syringe. The film lets the madness unfold and leaves you to decide whether you're laughing at the idiocy or with it. That ambiguity is exactly where it wants you.
Four stars. Excessive, electrifying, and just about earns its running time.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-06-15
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Martin Scorsese: Italianamerican (1974) · The King of Comedy (1982) · Gangs of New York (2002) · Cape Fear (1991)
More with Leonardo DiCaprio: Blood Diamond (2006) · The Beach (2000) · One Battle After Another (2025) · Gangs of New York (2002)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
