Jim Bennett has a 260,000 dollar trust fund parachute at his disposal. He is a smart college professor. He is good looking. He’s also a degenerate gambler who doesn’t care about owing three different people over 200,000 large each and accepts kicks to the chest and punches to the face as warnings. Bennett, played by a Boogie Nights skinny Mark Wahlberg with a lustful whatever cynicism, is a complete cinematic home run shot. Director Rupert Everett cuts and dices up William Monahan’s script into the middle of this gambler’s drunk salad, and the movie is a pure hypnotic thrill ride.

All I heard about going into the film from critics and other movie fans ran along these lines. Bennett isn’t likable so I can’t like the movie too much. Give me a break and go suck on a paperback Nicholas Sparks novel please. Everybody isn’t a charming sympathetic leading character in films today. The filmmakers took James Caan’s character from the original film in the 1970’s and turned him into a talky English professor philosophy loving gambling poet. I’m all in here. This is the movies, ladies and gents. This IS NOT real life. You want real life. Walk outside and watch traffic go by. I’ll stay here in the theater and bump my hips off the comfy leather seats to The Gambler’s groovy soundtrack(which includes M83, Sixto “Sugar Man” Rodriguez, Ray LaMontague among others). (more…)