Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

‘Wolf of Wall Street’ a dubious investment of your time

Naked Hookers! Cocaine! Quaaludes! Hookers and cocaine! Quaaludes and hookers! Dwarf tossing! Naked Leonardo DiCaprio with a candle in his butt! Leo snorting coke from a hooker’s butt! Rinse, repeat . . .

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — “Wolf of Wall Street.’’

Leonardo DiCaprio goes way, way, way over the top in this strenuously comic and far-too-faithful adaptation of the self-serving and credulity-straining memoir by Jordan Belfort, who spent just two years at a country-club prison for defrauding unwitting investors of millions (thanks to turning in his colleagues).

Scorsese’s classic “Goodfellas’’ explored crime and its consequences in fascinating detail, but this is a very different kind of movie. It’s basically an advertorial showing that crime pays, though it’s surprisingly uninterested in the particulars, much less Belfort’s victims (both those on his payroll and those coerced into investing their life savings in worthless stocks).

This is pretty well summed up in one of Leo-as-Belfort’s lengthy addresses directly to the camera, where he interrupts a none-too-clear explanation of a money-laundering scheme to tell the audience: “But you don’t care about any of this! All you care about is whether we made a sh–load of money!’’

Dicaprio, now pushing 40, needs to reconsider playing 20-something-year-old characters.Trailer

Belfort’s crimes — and his lengthy pursuit in the early 1990s by a party-pooping FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who finally takes him down — take a back seat to the depiction of what he did with that money. Much of it went up his nose and into various orifices of hookers. Scorsese and his screenwriter seem to think that the only way to depict these excesses is to be excessive themselves — why show one or two out-of-control bacchanals when you can stage a handful?

The films of what you might call Scorsese’s Leo period (from “The Aviator’’ on and including the DiCaprio-free “Hugo’’) have increasingly showcased scenes that go on forever mostly so that the maestro can indulge in elaborate camera moves that impress some critics but in no way advance the story.

There’s not much narrative drive in Terence Winter’s highly episodic script, and what little there is grinds to a halt for numerous sequences that really ought to have ended up on the cutting room floor. Like Belfort’s lengthy and pointless interrogation of a crooked butler, or a stormy, effect-laden trip on our hero’s huge yacht that could have been avoided if only he used the helicopter on the ship’s deck. And what exactly is Jon Favreau doing here except for collecting a paycheck?

A bigger problem for me was that except for Belfort’s quickly disposed-of first wife (Cristin Milioti, very good) and Rob Reiner’s underwritten part as Belfort’s father — the film’s very nominal conscience — there were no characters in this in many ways loathsome and amoral movie that I cared about. Belfort’s second wife (the bodacious Margot Robbie) is depicted as a greedy and manipulative sexpot and enabler, with all of the other female characters coming off far worse in this shamelessly misogynist epic.

The men are mostly crude ethnic caricatures — most prominently a very flamboyant, whore-chasing and coke-snorting Jonah Hill as Donny Azoff, a fictionalized version of Belfort’s real-life second-in-command, Danny Porush (who has questioned the veracity of some of Belfort’s wilder stories, including those with a dwarf and a horse).

And then there’s DiCaprio pushing 40, who really needs to stop playing characters in their 20s. You have to give him credit, though, for stretching here — and not just with that candle in his butt.

DiCaprioYouTube

There’s a very lengthy scene where DiCaprio demonstrates the tranquilizing effects of an unusually potent dose of quaaludes on his ambulatory skills. Let’s just say he’s no Jim Carrey, though Scorsese seems to think he is. Nor is DiCaprio’s Belfort as charming as the film requires — a quality the actor managed far better in “The Great Gatsby’’ (Matthew McConaughey shows how it’s done in a brief cameo here).

This is the most drug-obsessed Hollywood movie I’ve seen since Brian De Palma’s notorious “Scarface’’ 30 years ago. It reminded me of a quote attributed to Scorsese at the film’s New York premiere: “You guys are great — but be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood . . . because it’s about them.’’

I wonder if the director, who at 71 really lets it all hang out here, was attracted to the excesses of “Wolf of Wall Street’’ for personal reasons. Scorsese has publicly admitted he had a serious substance-abuse problem in the 1970s — and his drugs of choice matched Belfort’s: heroin and quaaludes.

Belfort recently boasted to The Post’s Andrea Peyser that he could make as much as $30 million from the movie. He promised it would all go to his victims, who the feds say have seen a small portion of the $10 million in restitution he promised to pay before beginning a lucrative career as a motivational speaker.

You might want to consider that before you fork over your $15 for a film that, in the final analysis, is more exhausting than exhilarating.