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.
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