10 Movies With Great Second Halves (But Awful Firsts)

Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby proved wildly divisive with critics and audiences alike, many smitten with its lavish sense of style and Leonardo DiCaprio's lead performance, while others took umbrage with its self-conscious slickness and controversial deviations from F. Scott Fitzgerald's source material.

The primary bugbear comes to light almost immediately, that Luhrmann's script pointlessly invents a new framing device in which Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is effectively writing The Great Gatsby as therapy for his mental health issues.

In turn, Luhrmann focuses far too much of the 142-minute runtime on Carraway, especially during its exhaustingly animated first half, with DiCapio's titular character taking an inordinate amount of time to show himself (even if some build-up is absolutely necessary).

The second half of the film reins in the stylistic excesses considerably and gives DiCaprio the floor to nail some killer dramatic scenes - especially the Plaza Hotel confrontation with Tom Buchanan (played brilliantly by Joel Edgerton), and of course, his climactic death scene.

Even if Luhrmann's CGI-heavy style often undermines the human drama at its core, The Great Gatsby's riveting second half gets closer to being the strident, passionate, and yes, faithful adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel that the first half absolutely wasn't.