BEFORE: I've reached the end of Ben Affleck week, but his 6 appearances this year will only tie him for fifth place (with a few other actors) when I count down all of the top actors at the close of business in just 22 films. There are at least 10 actors with more showings this year, and there will be no catching Fred Astaire for the top spot. But I've seen Affleck run the gamut this week, from a rich superhero to a rich gangster, a rich accountant/assassin and a rich shady stockbroker. So I'll wrap the week up with Ben Affleck as a rich online casino owner.
THE PLOT: When a poor college student who cracks an online poker game goes bust, he arranges a face-to-face with the man he thinks cheated him, a sly offshore entrepreneur.
AFTER: I don't know, this film started out being one thing and then took a left turn and finished as an entirely different sort of movie. Since it's neatly broken up into two halves it almost feels like the original story ran its course, so they had to start up another one to fill the remaining time. This college kid who's supposed to be so smart, like a marketing whiz going for his master's degree in finance at Princeton, but he gets in trouble for promoting this gambling web-site on campus. This is how he makes his tuition money, because he gets a percentage of the income that these students lose on the gambling site.
But if he's so smart, why didn't he check to see if gambling was against the university's rules? Or promoting gambling, for that matter? Was he really relying on the fact that the activity is taking place on-line to skirt the university's rules? Or did he know that what he was doing was illegal, and just hoping to not get caught? And then when the college says he can't market the site any more to his fellow students, and he's got to make his tuition somehow, what does he do? He risks ALL of his own money on the site, intending to turn it into a sizable bankroll, however, as we've just stated, this activity is illegal. Plus, he KNOWS that students have been losing their money there, so why would he think that he would be any different? He's either incredibly over-confident or very stupid at this point.
So when he loses all of his money (what a shocker...) he flies down to Costa Rica (Umm, who paid for the plane ticket, then?) to sneak his way into a party so he can catch the attention of Ivan Block, the man who runs the gambling web-site, because he figures there's NO possible way he could have lost all of his money unless someone was cheating, so if he alerts the site's owner to the cheating, he can get all of his money back. Right, Albert Brooks tried that in "Lost in America", it's not supposed to work. I mean, the day that casinos start giving money back, that's the day they go out of business, right?
But believe it or not, the casino owner is thankful for being alerted to potential cheating on his site, and he thanks the student by giving back his money. Since it's at this point where the plot takes a turn, we're never really sure if the casino owner does this out of genuine good will, or is only doing this for appearance's sake, in order to lure the student in further. Because the second part of the story involves the student going to work for the casino owner, because really, who needs the master's degree that they're only a few months away from getting? Doesn't dropping out of college when you're 75% of the way to getting your degree mean that you wasted all the money and time it took to get there?
So really, this is a film about making bad choices. And then making even worse choices to correct the bad choices. The FBI gets involved - despite the fact that they have no jurisdiction in Costa Rica, they're there anyway. So this is confusing, do they have jurisdiction over international online gaming, or not? Because if they do, they're not doing their job well, and if they don't, they're wasting their time by trying. Of course, it's also a little strange that someone making so much money from online gaming would also have a casino in the real world, which involves much greater expenses and risk, plus paying off the Costa Rican police and government every month.
Collectively, this film made less and less sense with every added plot point. So that meant it had to take a huge risk itself, and bend over backwards to bring all the elements together for some kind of resolution. Plus it's two different stories stitched together at the midway point, really. And it seems like nobody did any research into how either online or real casinos work before the writing began.
Also starring Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Black Snake Moan"), Gemma Arterton (last seen in "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Triple 9"), John Heard (last seen in "Pollock"), Michael Esper (last seen in "All Good Things"), Oliver Cooper, Christian George, Yul Vazquez, James Molina, Louis Lombardi (last seen in "The Crew"), Vincent Laresca (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Sam Palladio (last heard in "Strange Magic"), David Costabile (last seen in "Prime"), Bob Gunton (last seen in "The 33"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "The Walk"), Dayo Okeniyi (last seen in "Terminator Genisys"), Jordan Beder, with a cameo from Deadmau5.
RATING: 4 out of 10 hungry crocodiles
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