BEFORE: Day 4 of Affleck Week, just one more to go. After playing millionaire Bruce Wayne, a multi-millionaire accountant/hitman and then a (presumably) rich crime-lord, for the last two films he plays rich stock-market guys. Definitely a running theme going on here.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Wolf of Wall Street" (Movie #2,160)
THE PLOT: A college dropout, attempting to live up to his father's high standards, gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, but the job might not be as legitimate as it once appeared to be.
AFTER: Even after all this time, I can't really say why one movie succeeds and another one like it fails. To me this seems very similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street" in subject matter and tone, only it came first by about 13 years, and didn't seem to half of the critical acclaim, respect or any Oscar nominations. When I could argue that in some ways this is the superior film, at least from a storytelling point of view. The main character here feels bad about ripping people off in the stock market, while DiCaprio's character in that other film never showed any remorse, and that other film just devolved into three hours of watching stockbrokers snorting cocaine and having sex with hookers.
I guess in the end it all comes down to reputation, where "Wolf of Wall Street" relied heavily on the careers of both DiCaprio, McConaughey and director Scorsese, this one gives us instead Ribisi, Diesel and director Ben Younger. So I guess at the end of the day, it's not the quality of the story being told, it's the names of the people telling the story.
Now, that being said, it doesn't mean that this film is problem-free, far from it in fact. The first problem I noticed was the fact that some casting agent decided to put all of the most mumbly, hard-to-understand actors in the same film. Vin Diesel practically built his reputation on the low mumble, and didn't really display any propensity for proper diction until he played Groot. (I wouldn't know about the "Fast & Furious" films, that's a franchise I've managed to avoid.). The only times that actors in this film are not mumbling are when they're insulting each other - but at least when they're shouting, you can understand what they're saying.
Ben Affleck appears here as the older, veteran stockbroker in the investment firm, and gives a speech to the newbies that wanted very badly to be a cross between Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech from "Wall Street" and Alec Baldwin's "Coffee is for closers" speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross", but just couldn't reach that level of significance in the end.
The main character played by Ribisi can't catch a break, he's one of those people who always manages to be in the wrong place at the right time, and therefore fails upward (or is it "succeeds downward"?). After running an illegal casino near Queens College, he joins this brokerage as a trainee, only to find that the firm is taking too much of a percentage from every sale, and then learning that the claims he's making to the clients about their investments might not be true. Ya think? What tipped him off, besides the fact that the firm is an hour's drive from Wall Street, or the fact that all of their sales involved cold-calling random people? Was tele-marketing still so new back in the year 2000 that people not only took calls from telemarketers but actually ended up buying what they were selling? I guess it was a much simpler time back then, it's hard for me to remember.
Also starring Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Ted 2"), Vin Diesel (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Nia Long (last seen in "Keanu"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "The Big Fix"), Jamie Kennedy, Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "La La Land"), Taylor Nichols (last seen in "Godzilla"), Bill Sage (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Donna Mitchell (last seen in "St. Vincent"), André Vippolis, Jon Abrahams (last seen in "The Faculty"), Will McCormack (last seen in "Prime"), Peter Maloney (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Jared Ryan, Lisa Gerstein, with cameos from Kirk Acevedo (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Paper"), Anson Mount (last seen in "The Forger"), Desmond Harrington (last seen in "We Were Soldiers").
RATING: 5 out of 10 hands of blackjack
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