The Gambler (2014)

[mrtylerdurden]

Not as good as I had expected.

The Gambler is the story of a man who owes a lot of money to a lot of people, because of his gambling addiction. That man is Jim Bennett (Mark Whalberg) and he is a college English professor. Jim goes through a complicated process throughout the movie to get the money he owes, and that's the basic plot of The Gambler.

The trailers for this movie make it look really exciting and thrilling, but The Gambler is anything but that. The Gambler is a very slow moving movie and can really drag at times. I found myself pretty confused during the movie, and it gets pretty complicated towards the end, but I feel like I got the basic idea of the movie. The movie has it's share of cliches and I didn't find the story to be all that interesting. I really had to try hard to be interested in the movie, but the truth is that it can be really boring. There are some good moments in it, but they're few and far between. Let's talk about acting.

For the most part, Whalberg did well in this movie. I was never really blown away by his performance but it was still decent. He has some good scenes with long monologues and he delivers them well. I found the scenes in the classroom especially compelling and interesting, because Whalberg shows more energy in those scenes then he does in the rest of the movie. Whalberg did fine, but don't expect to be blown away by his performance.

I feel bad for saying so, but I felt like Brie Larson was possibly miscast in this role. Even though I find her to be very pretty and liked SEEING her, I was never truly compelled by her performance in the movie. Sorry Brie.

One of the best parts of the movie is Jessica Lange's performance. While she doesn't have very much screen time, every moment she was on screen she did a fantastic job. She does an amazing job playing the strong mother, and she delivered her lines perfectly. Jessica Lange's performance is definitely a huge plus for this movie.

Another big plus for this movie is John Goodman's performance. John Goodman only has a handful of scenes, but most of the time he is on screen he's delivering a long monologue. I wasn't a big fan of the dialogue in the movie, but John Goodman's scenes were written very well. His scenes were certainly some of the best parts of The Gambler, and probably partly why this gets a higher rating than it should.

I thought the camerawork was very good in this movie. Framing and lighting was very good and you can tell that the director of photography knew what he was doing. Camerawork is another big plus for this movie.

The soundtrack to The Gambler has a large mix of music, and I thought that the songs were picked well. This may even be a soundtrack worth owning. So, yes, music was good in this movie.

Overall, The Gambler just isn't that great of a movie. It can be very boring and confusing, and the dialogue, for the most part, wasn't all that great either. There's a lot more bad than good in this movie, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I wasted two hours. There were scenes that I'm glad I got to see, like Jessica Lange's scenes, John Goodman's scenes, and the scenes of Whalberg in the classroom. The camerawork was especially good, and the movie was full of varied and good song choices. But other than those few things, there isn't much else that great about this movie. But hey, if you want to see it, be my guest. Who knows, you might like it more than I did. I guess you could say that it's a gamble.

2

[cricket]

This is a movie, that had it been directed by Scorsese or PTA, I would've looked forward to it like no other. I can tell by the trailer that it doesn't meet it's potential. The original with James Caan is very good, and I'll still watch this because it's exactly my kind of movie, but my expectations are low. Say what you want about Mark Wahlberg, but he usually ends up in pretty good movies, but he was miscast in this, and this should not be a glamorous film.

[Ikkegoemikke]

The Gambler
2014
Rupert Wyatt

"I was playing for Mister Lee, and for that gentleman over there. I'm not actually a gambler."

I don't think it'll be a total surprise if I'd say that "The Gambler" is about a gambling addiction. Enough movies were made that shed a light on this issue and eventually you expect while watching such a movie, that feeling will come over you that resembles that of the addict while he's trying to make a profit at the gambling table. That intense feeling in your abdomen when you are about to win a substantial amount of money, the tension, the relief and the gnawing anger when things aren't going as they should. And I didn't have that feeling at all while watching "The Gambler". In the end I looked at it in the same way as Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) : indifferent, without euphoria or disappointment, as if he was observing the game from another player. It seems as if he wasn't playing with his own money. There's no pounding thrill like in "Rounders" where Matt Damon is trying to regain his lost fortune during a poker game. Why the hell did they actually make this film when there's a successful (from what I've read) version from 1974 with James Caan?

Jim Bennett is a university professor, a failed writer and a notorious gambler. But his gambling addiction became a sort of suicide mission. He owes a huge debt to the Korean owner of a well-known gambling house where extremely high bets are allowed, and a crafty African American moneylender. His personal attitude is the cause of him ending up in this situation. For Jim it's all or nothing. A disastrous attitude that causes his debts to grow considerably because the profits he usually makes in gambling are nil. Actually you can say they are non-existent. If there's one thing Jim particularly excels in, than it's losing. Ultimately, it seems like winning on its own is no longer important for him. Fortunately, it's not Russian roulette he plays, otherwise it would be a short film. The fact that he loses constantly, also ensures that this film actually isn't exciting or unpredictable. The rest of the film is filled with a series of dialogues that develop into debates about truth and success, laced with sarcasm and self-pity.

The fact that Wahlberg is the key figure in this quite boring film, isn't exactly an asset. Let's just say that I'm not really an avid fan of Wahlberg. Frankly, I thought he wasn't that bad as actor in his earlier works such as in "The Perfect Storm" and "The Italian Job", but the last four movies I saw him act in, weren't exactly impressive. "Broken City" was a mediocre film crammed with all sorts of banalities. "Pain & Gain" was painfully bad and "2 Guns" was somnolent. How innocent and timid he looks in the earlier films, the more pretentious and snobbish he is in these last three films. Notwithstanding that this perfectly fits the character he plays in "The Gambler", I thought he wasn't suitable for this role. I can't picture Wahlberg as an intellectual who teaches modern poetry and quotes Shakespeare and Robert Greene in a single sentence. I realized after a while that I know as much about Jim, as he knows about himself. Are you expecting an answer to the question why he maintains such a lifestyle ? I'm sure you will be disappointed.

The only thing I enjoyed was the performance of John Goodman as Frank, who is sympathetic but at the same time shouldn't be underestimated. The conversation he has with Jim in the steam room where he shakes rhetorical questions and symbolic equations out of his sleeve, is a superb fragment and a pleasure to watch. In every role Goodman succeeds, no matter how small it is, to lift it to a higher level so it's forever engraved in your memory. I can't think of parts he played that sucked. A true top actor. And then there's Brie Larson and Amy, who according to Jim is a natural talent and can succeed in becoming a reputable writer. Not a distinct role (just like that of Jessica Lange) but the upcoming romance luckily remains superficial.

Eventually I doubted whether Jim was a truly seasoned gambler or he's simply a selfish bastard feeding upon his mothers fortune, which he gambles away without blinking an eye and without even thinking about the consequences. A kind of world-weariness which made sure that it didn't matter to me at the end if the roulette ball landed on red or black. Maybe I would have preferred to see those gangsters ripping him apart in the end. Luckily I didn't bet on that ...

1.5