A professor with a gambling problem; The film tries to give it a philosophical spin, in deep debt to several street guys, stringing along a quirky relationship with a girlfiend, every bridge burned, is offered a chance to clear his debt if he gets a college athlete to sell out...Does this seem a little familiar? Even down to the scene where he hits an 18 and gets a 3? Am I the only one who saw "The Gambler" in 1974?; James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton, and Burt young in the identical script?
This copy is padded with plodding classroom scenes and yawning talks with the GirlFriend. The bad guys are meaner and slicker (there are no protagonists, least of all Mark Wahlburg as the soulless and nerveless gambler), and the dollar amounts are wildly inflated from 1974 values, as though $10,000 bank packs flying around are all that's needed to hold an audience. I guess it's true; The collective personalities in this movie, even with John Goodman, barely fill a bottle cap. Corporate actuarial charts determined that 40 years, ten years beyond the average generation gap, is enough time passed to rerelease, changeless, a movie that wasn't a great commercial success in the first place. Just take all the human motives out of it; Everyone is a face on a monitor, and these monitors face each other when they speak. 1974's product was no great shakes either, but compared to this cold slick thing, a very solid and human piece.
This copy is padded with plodding classroom scenes and yawning talks with the GirlFriend. The bad guys are meaner and slicker (there are no protagonists, least of all Mark Wahlburg as the soulless and nerveless gambler), and the dollar amounts are wildly inflated from 1974 values, as though $10,000 bank packs flying around are all that's needed to hold an audience. I guess it's true; The collective personalities in this movie, even with John Goodman, barely fill a bottle cap. Corporate actuarial charts determined that 40 years, ten years beyond the average generation gap, is enough time passed to rerelease, changeless, a movie that wasn't a great commercial success in the first place. Just take all the human motives out of it; Everyone is a face on a monitor, and these monitors face each other when they speak. 1974's product was no great shakes either, but compared to this cold slick thing, a very solid and human piece.
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