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.

Comments

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

I fear I’ve snapped his Gregory.

Twin Peaks 3.14: We are like the Dreamer.
(SPOILERS) In an episode as consistently dazzling as this, piling incident upon incident and joining the dots to the extent it does, you almost begin to wonder if Lynch is making too much sense. There’s a notable upping of the pace in We are like the Dreamer, such that Chad’s apprehension is almost incidental, and if the convergence at Jack Rabbit’s Tower didn’t bring the FBI in with it, their alignment with Dougie Coop can be only just around the corner.

And you people, you’re all astronauts... on some kind of star trek.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
(SPOILERS) Star Trek: First Contact (also known as plain First Contact, back when “Star Trek” in the title wasn’t necessarily a selling point to the great unwashed. Or should that be great washed?) is probably about as good as a ST:TNG movie could be, in as much as it actively rejects much of what made the TV series what it is: starchy, placid, smug, platitudinous exchanges about how evolved humanity has become in the 25th century. Yeah, there’s a fair bit of that here too, but it mainly recognises that what made the series good, when it was good, was dense, time travel plotting and Borg. Mostly Borg. Until Borg became, like any golden egg, overcooked. Oh, and there’s that other hallowed element of the seven seasons, the goddam holodeck, but the less said about that the better. Well, maybe a paragraph. First Contact is a solid movie, though, overcoming its inherent limitations to make it, by some distance, the best of the four big screen outings with Pic…

Now you're here, you must certainly stay.

The Avengers 4.1:The Town of No Return
The Avengers as most of us know it (but not in colour) arrives fully-fledged in The Town of No Return: glossier, more eccentric, more heightened, camper, more knowing and more playful. It marks the beginning of slumming it film directors coming on board (Roy Ward Baker) and sees Brian Clemens marking out the future template. And the Steed and Mrs Peel relationship is fully established from the off (albeit, this both was and wasn’t the first episode filmed). If the Steed and Cathy Gale chemistry relied on him being impertinently suggestive, Steed and Emma is very much a mutual thing.

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a nourish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le Carré. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.

Don’t get tipsy. We can’t have you hiccoughing in the coffin.

The Avengers 4.2: The Murder Market
Tony Williamson’s first teleplay for the series picks up where Brian Clemens left off and then some, with murderous goings-on around marriage-making outfit Togetherness Inc (“Where there is always a happy ending”). Peter Graham Scott, in his first of four directing credits, sets out a winning stall where cartoonishness and stylisation are the order of the day. As is the essential absurdity of the English gentleman, with Steed’s impeccable credentials called on to illustrious effect not seen since The Charmers.

Cool. FaceTime without a phone.

Sense8 Season One
(SPOILERS) The Wachowskis do like their big ideas, but all too often their boldness and penchant for hyper-realism drowns out all subtlety. Their aspirations may rarely exceed their technical acumen, but regularly eclipse their narrative skills. And with J Michael Straczynski on board, whose Babylon 5 was marked out by ahead-of-its-time arc plotting but frequently abysmal dialogue, it’s no wonder Sense8 is as frequently clumsy in the telling as it is arresting in terms of spectacle.

I frequently had the feeling that Sense8 was playing into their less self-aware critical faculties, the ones that produced The Matrix Reloaded rave rather than the beautifully modulated Cloud Atlas. Sense8 looks more like the latter on paper: interconnecting lives and storylines meshing to imbue a greater meaning. The truth is, however, their series possesses the slenderest of central plotlines. It’s there for the siblings to hang a collection of cool ideas, set pieces, themes and fascina…

How dare you shush a shushing!

Home (2015)
(SPOILERS) Every so often, DreamWorks Animation offer a surprise, or they at least attempt to buck their usual formulaic approach. Mr. Peabody & Sherman surprised with how sharp and witty it was, fuelled by a plot that didn’t yield to dumbing down, and Rise of the Guardians, for all that its failings, at least tried something different. When such impulses lead to commercial disappointment, it only encourages the studio to play things ever safer, be that with more Madagascars or Croods. Somewhere in Home is the germ of a decent Douglas Adams knock-off, but it would rather settle on cheap morals, trite messages about friendship and acceptance and a succession of fluffy dance anthems: an exercise in thoroughly varnished vacuity.

Those dance anthems come (mostly) courtesy of songstress Rhianna, who also voices teenager Tip, and I’m sure Jeffrey Katzenberg fully appreciated what a box office boon it would be to have her on board. The effect is cumulatively nauseating though, l…

A man who doesn't love easily loves too much.

Twin Peaks 2.17: Wounds and Scars
The real problem with the last half of the second season, now it has the engine of Windom Earle running things, is that there isn’t really anything else that’s much cop. Last week, Audrey’s love interest was introduced: your friend Billy Zane (he’s a cool dude). This week, Coop’s arrives: Annie Blackburn. On top of that, the desperation that is the Miss Twin Peaks Contest makes itself known.

I probably don’t mind the Contest as much as some, however. It’s undoubtedly lame, but it at least projects the season towards some kind of climax. If nothing else, it resolutely highlights Lynch’s abiding fascination with pretty girls, as if that needed any further attention drawn to it.

Special Agent Cooper: You made it just right, Annie.
I also like Heather Graham’s Annie. Whatever the behind the scenes wrangles that led to the disintegration of the Coop-Audrey romance (and it will be rather unceremoniously deconstructed in later Coop comments), it’s certainly the …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog