Watching the Gambler, is a Gamble of Your Time

By ELAF PATEL

 

 

Mark Wahlberg’s latest movie, directed by Rupert Wyatt, fails to impress the audience for several reasons. The biggest problem with this movie is its timing. While blockbusters inundate the cinema such as Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game, movie goers are disappointed by the slow paced repetitive movie that will someday make an amazing drinking game – "Every time Jim Bennet hits rock bottom do a shot."

 

The story follows the main protagonist; Jim Bennett played by Wahlberg, as he spirals downward and loses all his money. He then makes a series of bad decisions and borrows money from various people without any real means of paying them back. A backstory of Bennett being a bad professor and compromising a young athlete’s career as well as dating one of his students is at best, forgotten.

 

The one saving grace the movie has is that it acutely portrays the kind of addictive problem gambling can become. If viewers do not pick up on this by the multitude of problems the main protagonist encounters because of his gambling addiction, they can rest assured, because Wahlberg compares his addiction to alcoholism and drug addiction ATLEAST ten times. Similarly viewers are told repeatedly that Bennett is an awful professor while he sits at the front of the class in glasses sulking, telling his students how bad a professor he is.

 

While the romantic interest played by Brie Larson could have been a Hail Mary for this movie the lack of chemistry and banter between the two characters ensures no one cares when his gambling comes between him and his lady love. Even if the pair had sizzling chemistry the montages of her watching Bennet lose TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS makes her one of the most apathetic characters in this movie.

 

Towards the end of the movie the action picks up and against better judgment viewers root for “Marky Mark” to win and pull himself out of the sinking debt and a vortex of self-pity, his eventual victory is too predictable and hence hollow.

 

Once he wins, viewers can heave a sigh of relief because the movie is finally over. But, instead the protagonist is seen running and continues to run for an awful long time. Where could he possibly run after divesting himself of all worldly goods one wonders? Could it be to his student who he is inappropriately dating? That would be too clichéd. Yet, there is exactly where he runs.

 

Robbie Collin from the Daily Telegraph said on Rotten Tomatoes, “It's hard to know what to make of Mark Wahlberg's character in The Gambler - but at least that puts you on an equal footing with Wahlberg himself.” While Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian feels like “Mark Wahlberg's designer-suited performance is shallow and self-admiring.”

 

The most authentic part of the movie is the loan shark played by John Goodman who is a guru of sorts; he gives Wahlberg the kind of real talk one wishes someone had given him before he started this production. With a star cast of Mark Wahlberg, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange and John Goodman and a promising story, one wishes the movie had done a better job.

 

However, watching it is more tiresome than losing your last tenner on a bad hand of poker.