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.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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