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.
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| 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.
