Photo: Scott Garfield / 20th Century Fox

What is it about gambling-related B movies with the word “runner” in the title? Why can’t they suck less?

Runner, Runner is a B movie with many many problems, starting with the fact that it doesn’t know it’s a B movie. The plotting is predictable — hungry young buck lives the dream, loses himself, blah blah — and yet the script is elliptical on matters of jurisdiction; tells us more than it shows us about the dirty deeds of the villainous online-gambling tycoon, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck), who’s corrupted our hero, Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake); uses Princeton business school as a shorthand for a certain aspirational career path — or tendency towards crookedness, a running gag I could have gotten behind, except Princeton does not in fact have a business school; and bores the viewer to goddamn death with ponderous voice-overs from Richie that turn poker into a metaphor for…poker. Or occasionally circumstances proceeding directly from the shitty playing of poker.

Writing about poker is like writing about baseball: its argot is already braided so tightly into our everyday speech — hitting home runs, going all in — that it gets farty in a hurry if you try to get too grand with it. Runner, Runner is written by the same guys who wrote Rounders, but it’s the difference between watching The World Series Of Poker on ESPN and learning something from the commentary, and listening to that gasbag at your BIL’s weekly game repeat the non-fascinating saga of something something flopping a three something boat who fucking cares, get to the end! Rounders has a sense of humor about itself, and explains its milieu; Runner, Runner takes itself deadly seriously, but its stakes seem lower, possibly because it hinges its inciting incident on a bad beat whose nuances non-players won’t understand, and hangs a second key scene on craps, same problem. It’s also hard to care about Timberlake, who is miscast (too old, too not-good) and forced to VO lines like, “This isn’t poker; this is my life, and I have one play left. Push all my chips in, and hope to get lucky.” But you just said this is your l…ife, not poker? And anyway going all in is a bet, not a play, exactly? And shut up?

Affleck is kind of interesting as Block; I’d like to see him play villains in the future. This portrayal misses, though. The script is aiming for a Gordon Gekko type, and Affleck gets the glibness and impatience of that sort of rich guy who’s only interested in the rules he gets to make for other people, but something else is missing, the casual but omnipresent ruthlessness, the rage at getting bested. Anthony Mackie is fun as Agent Shavers, but his subplot is so poorly conceived across the board that it’s hard to be happy to see him. I suppose we might charitably call Gemma Arterton’s performance “opaque,” but perhaps she read the part and thought that, since a cardboard stand-up could do the same work for the Rebecca “character,” she’d just imitate one.

A self-absorbed, disorganized waste of time. Skip.

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