The Gambler

Film Review by Chris Fyvie | 22 Jan 2015
Film title: The Gambler
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Brie Larson, Michael K. Williams, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Alvin Ing
Release date: 23 Jan
Certificate: 15

Mark Wahlberg sheds the pounds and dusts off his best give-me-awards face to play Jim Bennett, a silver-spooned and self-destructive English professor whose extracurricular gambling activities find him in huge debt to both underground casino owner Mr Lee (Ing) and equally shady operator Neville Baraka (Williams). With seven days to clear his bill, Bennett flirts with borrowing even more from monstrous crime lord Frank (Goodman) to consolidate his loans and stake him further.

Making broad allusions to the 2008 financial crisis of bailouts and bullshit, the action is mostly well handled by director Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), the enormous swings of high-stakes roulette and blackjack presented without glamour; Bennett is up a hundred thousand in seconds, down the same a couple of seconds later. It’s a neat approach that helps emphasise the central metaphor, but too often the film reaches for more profundity. William Monahan’s script (based on Karel Reisz’s 1974 film, itself with roots in Dostoyevsky) is one of those strange creations where disparate people all appear to have read the same books, tackled the same existential and economic questions, and spout grand cautionary soliloquies at each other in an eerily similar rhythm.

But however awkward and irritating that may be, with dialogue as acidic as this delivered by actors like these, The Gambler somehow transcends its pomposity to be really quite fun. Wahlberg, in a tricky role to sell, creeps through the drama, all dark glasses and slept-in clothes, ably exuding the rich kid's tacked-on nihilism and punchable intellectual vanity. Meanwhile, Williams and Goodman are an absolute hoot whenever they’re onscreen, and Jessica Lange is at her spiky best as Bennett’s long-suffering mother. It's a shame Brie Larson, as Bennett's underwritten, bizarrely enabling student-cum-love interest isn't given the chance to similarly register. Kind of admirable, never less than watchable, but a bit of a mess.


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