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The Wolf of Wall Street tells the real-life tale of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker and playboy who was making almost a million dollars a week by the time he was 26 years old.
Starting at the bottom in a boiler room with Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), his boss who takes an instant shine to him and gives him some tips on how to get through the day, which partly involves shoving various powders up one’s nose, Jordan is determined to stay the course, stay clean and work towards his qualifications.
Six months after starting, on October 19th, 1987, he becomes a qualified stockbroker and ready to take on the world, so to speak, but that also happens to be Black Monday, the day the stockmarket took a massive tumble of over 500 points. Within a month, the company was shut down and Jordan ended up working in a place called Investors Centre, a small company that deals in penny stocks, selling to people who can’t afford them in large number.
Jordan’s talent allows him to impress upon potential clients – or “schmucks” as they keep referring to them – that these companies will soon be worth a fortune. As he goes on to build up his own empire, Stratton Oakmont, a newspaper exposé reveals his dodgy practices and dubs him “The Wolf of Wall Street”, hence the film’s title, and the tale is told from there, with the FBI taking an interest in his activities before too long.
The Wolf of Wall Street rattles along at a decent pace, but you can’t escape the fact that it definitely does *feel* like a three hour film.
Check out page 2 for more thoughts on the film.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.