English professor Jim (Wahlberg) is unable to resist a blackjack table. After winning then losing a massive amount of cash, then also losing the stakes he borrowed to cover his debts, he's in trouble with a loan shark (Williams) who's tired of extending his credit. His millionaire mother Roberta (Lange) knows that if she helps he'll just lose everything at the next casino he sees. So does big-time loan shark Frank (Goodman), who urges Jim to pay up and get out. And when Jim turns to a bright student (Larson) for help, things get messier.

They also turn queasy, because it's difficult enough to like a man who seems happy to lose a fortune in the blink of an eye when he's crippled by debt. Then he starts romancing a student less than half his age. As the story progresses, Jim gets less and less sympathetic, and Wahlberg plays him as an unapologetic loser, so the audience strains to find something in this man to cheer for. And it's impossible to escape the fact that he has created this storm around himself.

Even worse is the nagging suspicion that the script will probably contrive to get him out of it. Because that completely undermines any point the movie might have made. All that's left are director Wyatt's groovy editing rhythms and Wahlberg's too-convincing selfish jerk. Side characters inject more complexity, even if they never get very deep either. Lange has a couple of strikingly pungent scenes, but Larson barely registers in an underwritten role. At least the soft-spoken Goodman looks terrifyingly enormous as he sweats menacingly in a Turkish bath.

Everything about the film feels beefy - acting, directing, writing - so it's rather disappointing to discover, as the story unfolds, that there's nothing holding it together. It also doesn't help that Wyatt spends far too much time trying to turn card and basketball games into interesting cinema, which is frankly impossible. But the strangest thing is that this isn't a movie about gambling at all: it's a film about self-loathing, and by the end we loathe him too.

themes, language, violence

30.Nov.14