Rupert Wyatt’s discordant remake of the 1974 James Caan movie has a fatal flaw: the spoiled, self-destructive protagonist is not someone with whom you’d like to spend two hours.
By day, Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) works as an English professor at a Southern California college, spouting Shakespeare and Camus, while berating his students in classes that resemble bizarre group-therapy sessions.
At night, Bennett gambles. As the story starts, he’s $240,000 in debt to a Korean mobster (Alvin Ing) with only a week to repay. Every time his rich mother (Jessica Lange) bails him out, he goes back to the blackjack or roulette tables. No penny-ante stuff. This over-privileged jerk is into high stakes risk-taking.
His compulsive “double or nothing” wagering brings him into contact with one crooked loan shark (Michael Kenneth Williams) after another (John Goodman), along with a state tennis champ (Emory Cohen) and basketball star (Anthony Kelley).
Revising Karel Reisz and James Toback’s original concept, screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) moves the macho action from New York to Los Angeles, while director Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”) goes for snarky, superficial slickness.
Miscast Mark Wahlberg seems ill-at-ease as an intellectual; he’s far more convincing in blue-collar roles. The only believability emanates from Brie Larson (“Short Term 12”), as Bennett’s most gifted student and, eventually, girlfriend; since she works as a waitress at the casino, she knows about his addiction.
“You’re one of those guys who started out with no problems at all, and now you have all of them,” she astutely observes.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Gambler” is a second-rate 4. You can’t win with a weak hand.
