The Wolf of Wall Street

Michele and I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, last night.  And since then I have been trying to think of some redeeming quality of the movie.  Really trying, because it's a Martin Scorcese movie and he has directed some of my favorite movies of all time, including Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Departed.  So I really wanted to like WOW,  but I didn't, I couldn't, and I'm trying to come up with a single reason why, and I think I've got it down to one word: Gratuitous.
There was gratuitous depravity at every turn.  The usual peppering of F-bombs, which I was prepared for, more drug use than Requiem for a Dream, and more orgy scenes than Caligula, all in the telling of what was basically a cautionary tale about unfettered greed and excess.
Except that Scorcese, in telling this tale, needed to heed his own advice.  I get that telling a story about a guy who loves money for money's sake and who indulges in every kind of excess he can possibly imagine, requires a certain amount of R-rated material, but at almost three solid hours long, I found myself wondering if maybe someone didn't need to shout, "Cut!" a little sooner.
I have preached sermons about Pulp Fiction, I'm not a prude when it comes to adult content in a movie, and I kind of get what Scorcese was trying to do, but I think it just went too far.  Ultimately the characters were just static and two dimensional and you didn't care about any of them.  The story was basically a re-telling of Goodfellas, replacing the Mafia with Wall Street, and replacing Henry Hill with Jordan Belfort.  Except that Henry Hill was a more sympathetic character, at least I don't remember really wanting him to get caught the same way I wanted Belfort to get caught.
Normally, I would use this space to lift up something good and right about a movie, but the only thing I can do with WOW is tell you not to watch it.  Don't watch it with the hope that it has some redeeming value.  The only message is that unfettered greed is bad, but that our society ultimately has very few consequences for rich people who break the rules.  The best part of the movie is over in about the first twenty minutes, but after Leo Dicaprio has lunch with Matthew McConaughy, the best is over and there is still over two hours of movie to go, of which the only thing worth watching is a scene involving Dicaprio, Jonah Hill, Bo Dietl and some 20 year old Quaaludes.
Everything else is entirely predictable.
Ultimately it just feels like getting beaten with a depravity stick, which is not really very much fun.