10 Movies That Would Be Outstanding If They Weren't So Long

6. The Wolf Of Wall Street

Length: 179 minutes As it turns out, we should never trust the deadly combination of Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and an unlimited budget to deliver a concise film. Their most recent collaboration is a three-hour ode to overindulgence and features no fewer than one thousand scenes where someone does something they're not supposed to do, with someone they're not supposed to do it with, while extolling how wonderful it is to do the things you're not supposed to do. WE GET IT! THIS IS A MOVIE ABOUT EXCESS! And what better way to cram that theme down our throats than to present a marathon of sexual depravity and cocaine-related hijinks? Honest answer? By taking up an hour less of everyone's time. There's a point in the movie where the grotesque, hollowness of the main characters' actions are hilarious. And that's right in the middle of the second act. And then it just sorta...keeps happening. And the joke starts to wear suspiciously thin with no end in sight. Scorsese was probably hoping for the classic, overly long gag, where he'd run the joke into the ground so often that it becomes exhausting before somehow becoming funny again. Sadly, The Wolf of Wall Street never exceeds that mid-movie peak and the third-act reckoning comes far too late to be satisfying.