10 Bad Films By Great Directors

One of the ones that's only bad because it could've been so much better. Martin Scorsese taking on 80s excess with a coked-up Leonardo DiCaprio running riot on Wall Street sounds like an ideal premise, but what could've been a daring morality play turned into Marty basically filming three-hours of bacchanalian mischief, to no end.

The Wolf of Wall Street is far too accomplished stylistically - and far too well acted—to be a bad film per se, but Scorsese fails to address the corrosive nature of the ethically bankrupt men he depicts. The first hour is great, and the party scenes of lewd debauchery are indeed a riot. It's just that the riot continues into the second and third hours, with Scorsese never sobering up and simmering down to show that there are consequences to his characters' actions.

Scorsese's best, most iconic films are draped in Catholic guilt, and his most enduring characters are the ones whom he judges under the guise of his religion, but there's never the sense of that in Wolf; Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) is punished, but hardly. You get the impression that, for him, it was all worth it. He'd definitely do it again. The most disarming thing about The Wolf of Wall Street might be that Belfort himself gets a cameo, an ugly endorsement if ever there was one.