The Gambler (15.)
Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Brie Larson Jessica Lange, John Goodman and Michael Kenneth Williams. 111 mins.
The Gambler is one great big windbag suicide trip. In glamorous terms Wahlberg's character, Jim Bennett, is a degenerate gambling addict. An English Lit professor born into a wealthy family, he cruises around LA in his BMW losing money at cards and running up debts with vicious loan sharks whose threats to life and limb he accepts with casual equanimity.
But in real terms he's just an idiot gambler. He plays to lose, tossing away tens of thousands of dollars in a few minutes playing Blackjack. In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Danny De Vito's character Martini kept insisting the dealer hit him with a new card long after he had bust 21 and Bennett's strategy is barely more sophisticated than that. Every time he wins he goes all in for the next hand and is broke within a few minutes.
All gambling is a road to defeat; the skill is in negotiating the length of the journey. So what if he is exploring his existential death wish: where's the drama in watching somebody who deliberately takes a short cut?
A remake of a James Caan film from the seventies, this new version, directed by the English director of Rise of The Planet Of The Apes, can safely be described as talky. In this film everybody has a spiel. In his college classes Wahlberg rambles on aimlessly and barely mentions the texts he is supposedly teaching but not to worry because everybody else in this film, even the evil loan sharks, has a lecture to deliver.
Review of Lone Survivor
Transformers: Age of Existence
2 Guns
Pain and Gain
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Brie Larson Jessica Lange, John Goodman and Michael Kenneth Williams. 111 mins.
The Gambler is one great big windbag suicide trip. In glamorous terms Wahlberg's character, Jim Bennett, is a degenerate gambling addict. An English Lit professor born into a wealthy family, he cruises around LA in his BMW losing money at cards and running up debts with vicious loan sharks whose threats to life and limb he accepts with casual equanimity.
But in real terms he's just an idiot gambler. He plays to lose, tossing away tens of thousands of dollars in a few minutes playing Blackjack. In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Danny De Vito's character Martini kept insisting the dealer hit him with a new card long after he had bust 21 and Bennett's strategy is barely more sophisticated than that. Every time he wins he goes all in for the next hand and is broke within a few minutes.
All gambling is a road to defeat; the skill is in negotiating the length of the journey. So what if he is exploring his existential death wish: where's the drama in watching somebody who deliberately takes a short cut?
A remake of a James Caan film from the seventies, this new version, directed by the English director of Rise of The Planet Of The Apes, can safely be described as talky. In this film everybody has a spiel. In his college classes Wahlberg rambles on aimlessly and barely mentions the texts he is supposedly teaching but not to worry because everybody else in this film, even the evil loan sharks, has a lecture to deliver.
Review of Lone Survivor
Transformers: Age of Existence
2 Guns
Pain and Gain
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
