I am a scumbag gambler.

The Gambler

(2014)

(SPOILERS) Mark Wahlberg in serious lead actor mode ought always to be a warning sign. Put him in a comedy, more than likely, you’re reasonably sorted. Give him a supporting role in a drama, and you’re similarly quids-in. Here he’s starring in a remake of the 1974 James Caan picture, the title of which should be enough of a clue. But, if you need a bit more, this isn’t a happy-go-lucky caper like The Sting. The Gambler is a very much a ‘70s anti-hero part, the addict who destroys everything around him but still you’re expected to stick by him. Because it’s the ‘70s.

Except it isn’t. Not in Rupert Wyatt’s picture. And the attempt to update the tale leaves it looking rather silly and nonsensical, stranded somewhere between a desire for gritty consequences and a ridiculous fantasy of the (disenfranchised) heir to a fortune who also happens to be a (one-time) great novelist, an English Literature professor and a hopelessly addicted gambler. Oh, and a chap imbued with rampant charisma, such that he lectures his students in a nihilistic spin on Dead Poets Society about how none of them will ever amount to anything, how “desiring a thing cannot make you have it”, etc. He’s the personification of the immature student fantasy of the disillusioned could’ve-been, but who still has that one last shot at finding his humanity.

So The Gambler’s corny enough, and dumb enough in the first place, quite before Wahlberg is thrown into the mix. This is his most unlikely role since he played a science teacher in The Happening, which is to say he isn’t remotely convincing as an intellectual, even if you can buy him as a cocky, morally inebriated loser, willing to put everything on the table for his fix. It’s difficult enough finding an in with these oft-glamourised (in a “We’re telling you they aren’t heroic but really we think they are” sense) tales anyway, but The Gambler is particularly suspect in that it suggests an inescapable downward spiral before providing the hero with unearned salvation (it scarcely needs saying that the Caan picture avoided this).

Of which, it bears emphasising that this picture is so creatively bankrupt it resorts to illuminating our “hero’s” dash for freedom against the dawn sky with the sound of M83. I love M83, but employing them currently is the cheapest, most redundant means to manipulate a sequence for emotional uplift. I don’t know what Rupert Wyatt was doing making this. Perhaps he’s intent on pissing away the good notices Rise of the Planet of the Apes brought him. Or perhaps not: he did, after all, see the good sense of extricating himself from Fox’s Gambit movie (maybe he signed on thinking it was the remake of the Michael Caine movie, understandably having expunged all memory of the Colin Firth remake from his mind).

Anyway, there are some very good performers filling out the supporting roles, alas to no avail. Jessica Lange plays Mark’s long-suffering mum (dumb enough not to demand to pay off his debts herself, but then we wouldn’t get the big moneymaking finale where Marky Mark justifies the gambler’s fantasy, would we?) Brie Larson is typically great in a thankless student-besotted-with-her-professor part, and Michael Kenneth Williams brings an easy humour to his loan shark. Stealing the show is John Goodman’s shaven-headed super-bastard shark, the one who will kill your entire family if you don’t pay up. His every line is an over-written cliché, but because it’s Goodman he makes you believe it.

The Gambler didn’t cost much, which is just as well as it didn’t make much. William Monahan was no doubt grateful to pay off some bills after his London Boulevard catastrophe, and no one else will exactly suffer from it being an ill-advised broke-backed vanity piece for its star. Wahlberg never seems to be a film away from a hit at the moment. Even if Ted 2 underwhelmed, he’s always got the next comedy on the way (with Will Ferrell) or hitching himself to yet another jingoist crapshoot with Peter Berg. This was originally planned for Scorsese and DiCaprio, and I don’t think even they could have made much of it (it would have probably been on the Shutter’s Island end of the scale). With Wahlberg and Wyatt, while this isn’t an outright offensive stinker, it is utterly, utterly vacant.

I’m smarter than a beaver.

Prey (2022) (SPOILERS) If nothing else, I have to respect Dan Trachtenberg’s cynical pragmatism. How do I not only get a project off the ground, but fast-tracked as well? I know, a woke Predator movie! Woke Disney won’t be able to resist! And so, it comes to pass. Luckily for Prey , it gets to bypass cinemas and so the same sorry fate of Lightyear . Less fortunately, it’s a patience-testing snook cocking at historicity (or at least, assumed historicity), in which a young, pint-sized Comanche girl who wishes to hunt and fish – and doubtless shoot to boot – with the big boys gets to take on a Predator and make mincemeat of him. Well, of course , she does. She’s a girl, innit?

This entire edifice you see around you, built on jute.

Jeeves and Wooster 3.3: Cyril and the Broadway Musical (aka Introduction on Broadway) Well, that’s a relief. After a couple of middling episodes, the third season bounces right back, and that's despite Bertie continuing his transatlantic trip. Clive Exton once again plunders Carry On, Jeeves but this time blends it with a tale from The Inimitable Jeeves for the brightest spots, as Cyril Basington-Basington (a sublimely drippy Nicholas Hewetson) pursues his stage career against Aunt Agatha's wishes.

Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character.

Pulp Fiction (1994) (SPOILERS) From a UK perspective, Pulp Fiction ’s success seemed like a fait accompli; Reservoir Dogs had gone beyond the mere cult item it was Stateside and impacted mainstream culture itself (hard to believe now that it was once banned on home video); it was a case of Tarantino filling a gap in the market no one knew was there until he drew attention to it (and which quickly became over-saturated with pale imitators subsequently). Where his debut was a grower, Pulp Fiction hit the ground running, an instant critical and commercial success (it won the Palme d’Or four months before its release), only made cooler by being robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by Forrest Gump . And unlike some famously-cited should-have-beens, Tarantino’s masterpiece really did deserve it.

I think it’s pretty clear whose side the Lord’s on, Barrington.

Monte Carlo or Bust aka Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969) (SPOILERS) Ken Annakin’s semi-sequel to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines tends to be rather maligned, usually compared negatively to its more famous predecessor. Which makes me rather wonder if those expressing said opinion have ever taken the time to scrutinise them side by side. Or watch them back to back (which would be more sensible). Because Monte Carlo or Bust is by far the superior movie. Indeed, for all its imperfections and foibles (not least a performance from Tony Curtis requiring a taste for comic ham), I adore it. It’s probably the best wacky race movie there is, simply because each set of competitors, shamelessly exemplifying a different national stereotype (albeit there are two pairs of Brits, and a damsel in distress), are vibrant and cartoonish in the best sense. Albeit, it has to be admitted that, as far as said stereotypes go, Annakin’s home side win

Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.

Paterson (2016) (SPOILERS) Spoiling a movie where nothing much happens is difficult, but I tend to put the tag on in a cautionary sense much of the time. Paterson is Jim Jarmusch at his most inert and ambient but also his most rewardingly meditative. Paterson (Adam Driver), a bus driver and modest poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, is a stoic in a fundamental sense, and if he has a character arc of any description, which he doesn’t really, it’s the realisation that is what he is. Jarmusch’s picture is absent major conflict or drama; the most significant episodes feature Paterson’s bus breaking down, the English bull terrier Marvin – whom Paterson doesn’t care for but girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) dotes on – destroying his book of poetry, and an altercation at the local bar involving a gun that turns out to be a water pistol. And Paterson takes it all in his stride, genial to the last, even the ruination of his most earnest, devoted work (the only disappoint

Death to Bill and Ted!

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) (SPOILERS) The game of how few sequels are actually better than the original is so well worn, it was old when Scream 2 made a major meta thing out of it (and it wasn’t). Bill & Ted Go to Hell , as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was originally called, is one such, not that Excellent Adventure is anything to be sneezed at, but this one’s more confident, even more playful, more assured and more smartly stupid. And in Peter Hewitt it has a director with a much more overt and fittingly cartoonish style than the amiably pedestrian Stephen Herrick. Evil Bill : First, we totally kill Bill and Ted. Evil Ted : Then we take over their lives. My recollection of the picture’s general consensus was that it surpassed the sleeper hit original, but Rotten Tomatoes’ review aggregator suggests a less universal response. And, while it didn’t rock any oceans at the box office, Bogus Journey and Point Break did quite nicely for Keanu Reev

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

Last Action Hero (1993) (SPOILERS) Make no mistake, Last Action Hero is a mess. But even as a mess, it might be more interesting than any other movie Arnie made during that decade, perhaps even in his entire career. Hellzapoppin’ (after the 1941 picture, itself based on a Broadway revue) has virtually become an adjective to describe films that comment upon their own artifice, break the fourth wall, and generally disrespect the convention of suspending disbelief in the fictions we see parading across the screen. It was fairly audacious, some would say foolish, of Arnie to attempt something of that nature at this point in his career, which was at its peak, rather than playing it safe. That he stumbled profoundly, emphatically so since he went up against the behemoth that is Jurassic Park (slotted in after the fact to open first), should not blind one to the considerable merits of his ultimate, and final, really, attempt to experiment with the limits of his screen persona.

If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) (SPOILERS) There’s something daringly perverse about the attempt to weave a serious-minded, generation-spanning saga from the hare-brained premise of The Place Beyond the Pines . When he learns he is a daddy, a fairground stunt biker turns bank robber in order to provide for his family. It’s the kind of “only-in-Hollywood” fantasy premise you might expect from a system that unleashed Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and Point Break on the world. But this is an indie-minded movie from the director of the acclaimed Blue Valentine ; it demands respect and earnest appraisal. Unfortunately it never recovers from the abject silliness of the set-up. The picture is littered with piecemeal characters and scenarios. There’s a hope that maybe the big themes will even out the rocky terrain but in the end it’s because of this overreaching ambition that the film ends up so undernourished. The inspiration for the movie

Everyone creates the thing they dread.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (SPOILERS) Avengers: Age of Ultron ’s problem isn’t one of lack. It benefits from a solid central plot. It features a host of standout scenes and set pieces. It hands (most of) its characters strong defining moments. It doesn’t even suffer now the “wow” factor of seeing the team together for the first time has subsided. Its problem is that it’s too encumbered. Maybe its asking to much of a director to effectively martial the many different elements required by an ensemble superhero movie such as this, yet Joss Whedon’s predecessor feels positively lean in comparison. Part of this is simply down to the demands of the vaster Marvel franchise machine. Seeds are laid for Captain America: Civil War , Infinity Wars I & II , Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok . It feels like several spinning plates too many. Such activity occasionally became over-intrusive on previous occasions ( Iron Man II ), but there are points in Age of Ultron whe

Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog