By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 2013’s The Wolf Of Wolf Street, Martin Scorsese’s crazed business world comedy drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie.
Consider this for a minute. Jonah Hill – that smug, yo-yo dieting little turd who gives exactly the same performance in every film that he appears in – has two Oscar nominations. The first was for that shitty baseball movie that apparently “wasn’t really about baseball” (um, yes, it was), Moneyball, and the second was for The Wolf Of Wall Street, the most annoying movie to come gurgling and snorting out of Hollywood for, well, a couple of weeks.
Proving that all you have to do to impress The Academy is wear fake teeth and whack off at a pool party (who’s next, Johnny Knoxville?), Jonah Hill is just one of the many terrible things about The Wolf Of Wall Street. This is the kind of film that people have to pretend to like in order to not look like squares or old fogeys. This flick is “wild” and “daring”, so you better get on board!
Directed by Martin Scorsese in a fashion that would suggest that he’s been drinking way too much red cordial – and is desperate to recapture his youth – The Wolf Of Wall Street is the story of a prick who works in New York’s financial district and does lots of drugs and rips people off. Leonardo DiCaprio plays this A-grade tool with zero nuance, and never lets us know what makes him tick, but that’s not really the point, is it?
Despite the Oscar nominations and the critical wrist-work, The Wolf Of Wall Street is just a college party movie hiding beneath a slick suit and lots of cologne. Its macho, dickhead, men-on-heat characters do lots of drugs, screw lots of women, throw dwarves, and whack off at pool parties. But because it’s directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, everyone blathers on about how it’s a critique of American excess, a piece of social commentary, and blah blah blah.
Yeah, right, sure it is. Everyone involved with this Porky’s-for-the-new-millennium looks to be having waaaay too much fun to be critiquing anything…except perhaps for Jonah Hill’s technique for whacking off at a pool party.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
