The Gambler

This is a film that is quietly confident. Everything's well-composed. Everything's put together right. There's a very sure hand on the wheel here, and at this point, I'm sold on Rupert Wyatt as a guy who can tell a story with a certain kind of intelligence, both towards his subject and towards his audience.

Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist’s dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power.

In any case, none of the gambles Jim makes over the course of the movie are as ballsy as the film’s casting strategy. Will audiences really buy Mark Wahlberg as a wordsmith too brilliant for academia? Smart money says no.

Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.

Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.

The one bit of good news is that the first Gambler is currently streaming on Netflix. Do yourself a favor and watch that one instead.

Richard Brooks made a tougher and much better film about the tragedy of compulsive gambling in his 1985 film "Fever Pitch," and in 1949’s "The Lady Gambles," even Barbara Stanwyck made a more convincing fall from respectability into casino hell than Mark Wahlberg does here.

I give the Gambler 10 stars out of 10 I thought Mark Wahlberg was excellent as the gambler I thought his mom was superb I recommend this movie to **** sound score was off the chain !we went to see into the woods earlier I am so glad that we went to see that first cause if we wouldntwewould've had a very unsatisfactory evening.

I enjoyed the Gambler for what it was, a competent film with a few flaws. The lead played by Mark Wahlberg is hard to sympathise with as he goes far beyond the pale with regards to his gambling problem, but worse than that spends a good portion of the film spouting pseudo-philosophical drivel. I'm giving the film a six because there were genuine moments of tension and the final ten minutes were fantastic

A better movie would have been about Stuey Ungar. This movie was boring, and left me feeling like ok. Stuey Ungar had a much more interesting story that was similar to this, but much more exciting.

This movie was disappointing. 1) I love gambling, 2) I love a good action/suspense/crime story, and 3) mark Wahlberg is often quite tolerable. This move however, has a few terrible flaws: 1) Mark Wahlberg as "literary genius".... nuff said, 2) there is no discernible ending or "point" to the movie. 3) When someone gambles, he either loses or wins. What does either outcome have to do with character development, message, theme. so much of the movie is just based on a coin flip. I had high hopes, but it just fell flat.

I just had a very hard time believing that everything that happens in this movie would actually happen in real life, even to the most hardcore addictive gamblers in the world. That and the fact that Wahlberg just seems out of place throughout the entire thing. He spends the first 3/4ths of the movie spouting philosophical nonsense bout victory and death, all the while losing over half a million dollars gambling just because. Then the ending takes an extremely different turn and just doesn't go well with the rest of the movie. The rest of the cast here just feels stiff, except for John Goodman as he is easily the best part of the movie. But the rest of it is just a hodgepodge of terrible ideas and acting, to go along with the lack of emotion that's given by each of the characters. I wouldn't waste my time seeing this if I knew what I knew now. This is just not a very good movie.