Fists of cash, hookers and a candle in your bum palls after a while

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street will set the cat among the pigeons as a number of films do. 12 Years A Slave set the cat among the pigeons with some critics claiming it was ‘torture porn’ and other people taking to the blah-blah-blah and jabber-jabber-jabber of the Twittersphere to say they had no intention of seeing anything ‘so harrowing’. (Luckily for them, I plan to open shortly a specialised cinema, The Comfort-Zone Cinema, possibly on the Finchley Road, which will never show anything upsetting, and Hello, Dolly! every other Tuesday.) This time out, the blah-blah jabber-jabber will, I imagine, take the following form: does Wolf exult in the excesses it intended to satirise? Does it get off on its own virulent misogyny rather than indict it? Why aren’t the swindled victims portrayed? And, hopefully: can you really hire a midget in a Velcro hat to throw at a giant dartboard? (I have a milestone birthday coming up and would like to lay on some kind of unusual entertainment, so am seriously interested.) However, it may not be worth getting het up about any of that, if only because this is such a monotonous, repetitive piece of work.

They do vodka and champagne and cocaine and morphine and Valium and Quaaludes (their favourite)

There are spectacular set pieces. There are the Scorsese money shots. There are gloriously funny moments. Leonardo DiCaprio is sublime, if rather exaggeratedly manic, and Matthew McConaughey, who only appears briefly, is electrifying. (Best scene ever.) But it’s also three hours of the same events, over and over. Make a ton of money, get totally whacked on drugs, have sex with hookers. Make a ton of money, get totally whacked on drugs, have sex with hookers.