First 2 reviews of "The Great Gatsby" are disappointing

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DiCaprio is a total misfire as Gatsby, thick and expressionless and unable to evoke any real sense of longing, and Tobey Maguire plays Carraway more as feeble-minded than anything else. Carraway is so passive through so much of the movie, so unwilling to take a position on anything that's happening around him, that he just doesn't work as a narrator. Considering he's the one person who is constantly telling us exactly what he's thinking and feeling, we learn basically nothing about him, and at the end of the film, he's just as much of a blank as he was at the start.

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I have spoken with three people now who have struggled to articulate their feelings about this film before landing on "I didn't hate it," and that seems damning to me. I don't hate it, either, but I can't really recommend anything about it. It is professionally made and entirely limp, a gorgeous piece of craft hung on a nothing of a script, a prime case of how you can throw all the best intentions in the world at a project and none of it matters if if just doesn't click, chemistry-wise. There was never a moment in the film where I was anything less than aware that these were actors playing dress-up on expensive and completely artificial sets, and certain performances (Jason Clarke being a prime offender) are so far over the line into melodrama that I couldn't take any of it seriously.

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It doesn't help that the cast feels like they're in different movies — and none of them are movies you'd particularly want to see. The blank and reactive Maguire and Mulligan are cast as the blank and reactive Nick and Daisy, the result being such a vortex of nothing that they threaten to disappear from the screen entirely. Edgerton perspires and chews the scenery in his best Snidely Whiplash manner, while DiCaprio has a fluctuating accent that often sounds like it's being delivered through a mouthful of marshmallows. DiCaprio's utterances of Gatsby's pet endearment "old sport" become more and more cringe-worthy with each repetition.

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Humanity is, in fact, in short supply here, with most of the supporting characters reduced
to grotesque mugging and posturing. Luhrmann treats the people of color here like exotic
furniture, shooting his African-Americans as though he were planning to turn them into Mammy cookie jars. It’s a queasy situation only compounded by the bizarre casting of legendary Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan as Gatsby's unsavory associate Meyer Wolfshiem.

The cardinal sin of this new "Gatsby" is that it’s dull, and say what you will about
Luhrmann’s previous movies, that’s not an adjective that usually comes up. Here, sadly,
you can hear the wheels of the plot grinding as loudly as Gatsby’s custom Duesenberg.

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