I watched it. Or, well, I should say I watched half of it before stopping it because it was awful. I'm not surprised it turned out that way either, because I felt the same way about the book when I had to read it in high school. Only finished it because I didn't want to fail the stupid class.
Nick Carraway is a boring and highly uninteresting character, which was rather disappointing because I had hopes that Tobey Maguire would be able to liven the dork up a bit. There's nothing outstandingly good or bad about him as a person or character. He's just bland. A bland main character makes for bland interactions, and that's bad for a movie.
Gatsby himself was an awkward manchild who was painful to watch. For that I say kudos to Leonardo DiCaprio, he captured the character perfectly from the book. The guy was too fucking awkward to talk to a girl. That was the entire impetus of the story. Lame as fuck, and often cringe-inducing. Ever seen an episode of a teen drama where some guy asked their friend to ask a girl to the dance for them? Yeah, that's the plot of this movie, except with mountains of extra awkward nonsense heaped on top.
The rest of the cast was a bunch of two dimensional caricatures for the first half of the movie. They might've gotten better later on, as some of them did in the book, but seriously, not very good as a whole.
The only positive points of the movie were the cinematography and the costume/scenery work. They did a good job of capturing the whole roaring twenties feel, so credit to them there. It just wasn't enough to make up for the abominable characters and plot.
