Taking A Gamble Going to See “The Gambler”
“The Gambler” by the great Rupert Wyatt, best known for directing the great “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” which got him nominated for best director at the Saturn awards. He teamed up Paramount Pictures and managed to get a star studded cast full of huge names like Jessica Lange, John Goodman, and lead by the Oscar nominated Mark Wahlberg.
With a cast as star studded as the one of “The Gambler”, it would be hard to see how it could have possibly fell so flat. But “The Gambler” may have been such a bust in the eyes of the critics because some phenomenal movies, like American Sniper, Fury, and Interstellar, along with one of the most talked about movies of the past 20 years, The Interview, came out during the same couple of weeks.
It did surprisingly well in ticket sales though, bringing in a whopping $33,542,093 as of January 23rd. So if one was to look off of strictly ticket sales, they may have been tricked into thinking the movie was worth the $11 admission. This was far from the truth however.
Jim Bennett, Mark Wahlberg, was a college professor of an English class, but was very unprofessional by the way he dressed, wearing the same thing every day, and his use of vulgar language while teaching his class. As far as the audience knows he only teaches one class, that consists of about 75 kids, while dwindles to less and less as the movie goes on. The lack of drive when teaching may have led to his debt, but it is never stated. And out of all of the millions of people he has ever taught in his history of teaching this class, this random girl, who is breathtakingly beautiful, has seen him in his “double” life.
Jim Bennett started off the movie $250,000 in debt. It is never stated how, or why he was in this crippling debt. It also doesn’t ever go back to help explain anything about the gambling “problem” that Jim had. So watching the movie, you are trying to figure out why Jim doesn’t get help for his “problem” and is in no rush to get out of a quarter of a million dollars in debt, but they must have lost that section of the script.
His family was loaded and offered to bail him out many times, giving him $250,000 in cash, to which he just blew in less than an hour with his new fling, the stunning student that had seen him in his “double” life.
So instead he decided to take out a loan with two of the most powerful people in the entire city, which just happen to be the easiest people to find on the face of the planet. These people gave him a week to pay back all of the money, plus points. If he failed to do so they would kill everyone who cared about him, which included a short list of people such as his mother and girlfriend/student. So Jim had a week to payback well over $250,000, the same amount of debt that he started with at the beginning of the movie. Seems reasonable, right?
I’m not going to say if he manages to get that $250,000 within the weeks and you’ll have to go see the movie to find out if he can change his ways or not, but if I were you, I’d wait till it comes out on Netflix or On-Demand.
The ratings did not do as well as the financial aspect of “The Gambler.” On the reputable site IMDB.com, the movie received a 6.1 out of ten. If I were to give the movie a rating however, I would only give it about five stars. The movie had an interesting story line, but had many plot holes that were never filled. Mark Wahlberg had a good overall performance, but he couldn’t save the movie from becoming average and failing to stick in people’s mind.
Go ahead and check out the trailer here.