Ben Is Back: He should have stayed away

Ben Is Back (2018) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for frequent profanity, dramatic intensity and drug use
By Derrick Bang

It’s a shame to see a fine performance wasted on poor material.

Julia Roberts acts up a storm in this well-intentioned melodrama, but writer/director Peter Hedges’ increasingly contrived script ultimately defeats her. 

Ben (Lucas Hedges, center) is protectively flanked by his mother (Julia Roberts) and
step-father (Courtney B. Vance), as they watch his younger half-siblings participate
in a church Christmas pageant.

Part of the problem is familiarity breeding contempt, and raising expectations. We’ve recently seen Beautiful Boy, which is a far superior study of a family attempting to endure — and surmount — the anxiety-laden complexities of dealing with a drug-addicted young adult son. That film felt authentic, its various crises proceeding logically, one to the next.

Hedges, in great contrast, lards his film — which takes place during a single 24-hour day — with an escalating series of revelations, challenges and predicaments that ultimately become ridiculous. The compressed time period doesn’t help, since it calls greater attention to the escalating absurdity.

The morning of Christmas Eve is bright and cheerful, until Ben Burns (Lucas Hedges) surprises his family with a visit: unexpected — even potentially unwelcome — because the 19-year-old is supposed to be confined to a detox clinic. It’s okay, Ben smoothly insists; my progress has been excellent, so my sponsor approved this one-day visit, for Christmas.

His mother Holly (Roberts) is deeply conflicted, a duality that Roberts conveys superbly. Holly wants to believe him, but is doubtful; her daughter Ivy (Kathryn Newton), slightly younger than Ben, doesn’t trust him for a second. More to the point, Holly has built a new life, with a second marriage to Neal (Courtney B. Vance) that has produced their own two young children, Lacey (Mia Fowler) and Liam (Jakari Fraser). Their safety also warrants consideration.

(There’s no significant reference to Ben’s father, who plays no role here.)

Neal, patient and pragmatic, reminds his wife that they’ve been through this countless times before; rules have been established, which Holly agreed to. But it’s Christmas, and she desperately wants to share the holiday with her son. Ben, for his part, launches a charm offensive that quickly wins over his half-siblings.

But we viewers already know, emphatically, that Ben is lying. We watched him arrive at the house, while his mother and the other children were out shopping: witnessed his anger and impatience at not being able to get inside.

Runner Runner: A fouled hand

Runner Runner (2013) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity and occasional blunt sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Some movies defiantly wear their movie-ness like an ill-advised badge of honor.

The premise is so contrived, the characters so ill-defined, their behavior so random, that all we can do is shake our heads in resignation, thinking, What can we expect? It’s only a movie.

It's every teenage boy's dream come true: Richie (Justin Timberlake, left) couldn't be
happier when Internet gambling tycoon Ivan Block (Ben Affleck) accepts him as a
protégé. Of course, Richie fails to heed the slightest trace of common sense, branding
himself as the biggest sucker of all time: an attitude without which we wouldn't have
this film. Which might have been a good thing.

Runner, Runner fits that bill.

The script, credited to Brian Koppelman and David Levien, is absolutely ludicrous. It opens with a behavioral howler and just gets worse, its central character — our de facto hero — ignoring common sense to a degree that makes it impossible to sympathize with him. Frankly, he fully deserves the consequences that he eventually struggles so hard to escape.

Let him hang, and move on.

But no, that would defy the revenge scenario that Koppelman and Levien so clumsily stitch together, from one bewildering moment to the next. Director Brad Furman, perhaps recognizing the weak hand he has been dealt, does his best to dazzle us with Costa Rican scenery and the wretched excess of an opulent casino gaming community.

Indeed, cinematographer Mauro Fiore lingers so long on such a setting, when our young hero initially enters this hedonistic realm, that I began to wonder if Furman had forgotten what to do next.

Runner, Runner, set in the world of Internet gambling, is an echo for Koppelman and Levien. They made their bones back in 1998 with Rounders, a slick suspense thriller also involving high-stakes poker and a protagonist — in that case, Matt Damon — who gets in over his head. Clearly obsessed with gamblers and intricate stings, Koppelman and Levien subsequently created the short-lived TV series Tilt and brought the Danny Ocean series to a satisfying conclusion with Ocean’s Thirteen.

Things since then haven’t been nearly as satisfying, with two failures — The Girlfriend Experience and Solitary Man, both in 2009 — that were outside their comfort zone. No doubt Koppelman and Levien viewed Runner, Runner as a means of returning to what they know best.

Well guys, they say you can’t go home again ... and that’s certainly the case here.

Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake), a Wall Street up-and-comer who lost everything when the market crashed, has started over as a Princeton grad student. Lacking a respectable means to fund his education, he has been earning a commission as a shill for Midnight Black, an enormously successful Internet gambling site.

Alas, Princeton’s dean (a small but well-played role by Bob Gunton) thinks little of Richie’s clandestine operation, and orders it shut down. With no other means of earning tuition money, Richie goes “all in” one night by yielding to the very temptation that he has professed, during his smart-alecky narration, to be smart enough to avoid: playing online poker at Midnight Black. Naturally, he loses everything.

But suspiciously.