DIRECTOR: Brad Furman
CAST: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, David Costabile, Sam Palladio, Oliver Cooper, Bob Gunton
RUNNING TIME: 91 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: After losing his tuition fees in an online poker tournament, Richie Furst (Timberlake) travels to Costa Rica and confronts the site’s owner Ivan Block (Affleck) who offers him a slice of the sleazy, corrupt lifestyle…
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NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
It’s difficult to write about a film like Runner Runner. Not that there’s so much to say about it, actually quite the opposite. There’s almost nothing that can be said about this film, because as soon as you walk out of the cinema you instantly forget everything you just watched. It doesn’t even linger on as a subconscious thought; the entire thing just evaporates into thin air. It is just THAT forgettable a movie experience.
It’s a shame, because there was potential. Two bankable and popular lead actors, one of whom had just come off the biggest hit of their directing career with awards-a-plenty, and a director whose last film The Lincoln Lawyer sparked the resurge of Matthew McConaughey’s acting talents. Off the bat, it sounds like a winner. What we get, however, is nothing short of half-assed; the direction’s sloppy, the writing relies heavily on clichéd plot points, and it all seems like a nice holiday for its stars to relax and enjoy themselves whilst every other day filming a below-average Hollywood thriller with any chances of potential squandered horrifically.
Whatever charm that Justin Timberlake generated in previous films like The Social Network and Friends With Benefits is barely running on steam here. He sleepwalks through his bland protagonist role, with complete disinterest and a mind frame that wishes he were doing something else, like perhaps enjoying his nicely paid-for holiday. Ben Affleck, on the other hand, is at least trying to make an impression, but once again he’s let down by weak material that moulds him into something of a rejected Bond villain. Those still fearing about his forthcoming role as Batman will probably use this film as an argument against his casting, but others will just see it as yet another misstep in a more-carefully handled acting career. As for the rest of the cast, Anthony Mackie is only limited to a handful of scenes and even then he’s stuck with an obnoxious FBI agent character that we’re suddenly supposed to side with by film’s end; and Gemma Arterton… she exists. That’s all this film really does in her favour.
The world of the gritty, dirty behind-the-scenes dealings of online gambling was never going to make for an interesting film – we’ve seen this dark side of the colourful party many times before, and done much better in films like The Last King of Scotland – but the least they could have done was make it look cool, suave and sexy like in the Ocean’s trilogy (the third part of which the writers of Runner Runner wrote for). As you may have guessed, the film never does that. Instead focusing on dealings with dirty cops and politicians – you know, stuff we’ve seen a million times already – it doesn’t do anything new with those developments either. Even when it calls for focus, the film just insultingly rushes it. As soon as Timberlake agrees to become part of Affleck’s industry, a long series of events that see our hero rise among the ranks is instead shown over a Timberlake-narrated montage, and then all of a sudden he’s made it. This is an area that they could have made interesting, showing all the dirty manoeuvres he’s essentially forced to do to make his way up, but it’s all so rushed here that you wonder why they didn’t just do a Les Miserables-style transition when it’s suddenly one month later or something. They might as well have done that if they’re just going to skip over the development like that.
Nothing original can be found in the body of this film. Nearly all of its organs are directly taken from much better sources, it has a brain path that is so dull it’s instantly forgettable, and there seems to be no soul occupying the carcass. Runner Runner is just another corpse to fling on to the wheelbarrow, with all the other stinkers this year.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Nowhere near the absolute worst of films this year, but Runner Runner’s dull plot, boring characters, bored actors and uninteresting ethics all add up to something truly forgettable. Now, this could make the argument that it makes it worse, but then again we saw Diana – at least this had a little effort put into it by Affleck.
