thoughts on Runner Runner

Well. That was very disappointing.

Justin Timberlake stars as Richie Furst, a grad student at Princeton whose makes money on the side bringing in customers for an online gambling site.  He gets in trouble with the dean for gambling on campus at around the same time his tuition, $20,000, is due; he doesn't have it, but he has over $17,000, so he decides (naturally) to bet it all and see if he can win the rest.  He loses everything, but he manages to figure out that the site has cheated him, so he flies down to Costa Rica to confront the site's owner, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck).  Ivan denies knowing that his programmers were cheating customers, but is impressed that Richie was able to figure out that this was happening, so he offers him a job.  Richie takes it, and all seems great until he is confronted by an FBI agent (Anthony Mackie), who basically tells him that Ivan's up to some shady shit, they're trying to take him down, and if Richie doesn't help them, he's going down with him. 

Already you can see that much of this is fairly implausible.  The problem is, it should be more fun.  Generally, I love gambling movies.  I really like Justin Timberlake.  Ben Affleck isn't my favorite, but he's playing a shady rich bully here, which he does well, and which should be entertaining.  The thing is, though, the fun of gambling movies comes from both the tension of the games the gamblers are playing and the challenge of trying to figure out how they're pulling it all off.  Part of the problem is that the gambling here takes place online, meaning it is more difficult for the filmmakers to build tension and completely impossible for the audience to figure out things along with the main character; even if you are a computer programmer yourself, it's not like you have access to the code Richie is using. 

Another problem is that though gambling is Ivan's business, it almost might as well be drugs or weapons or any other shady thing, considering the lack of insider knowledge we get on the online gambling industry.  The real tension comes (or should come) from Richie slowly realizing that Ivan is up to no good and trying to take him down, but it's pretty easy to tell right from the beginning that Ivan is shady, and the impending takedown is too all over the place to really care about.  First Richie is going to be loyal to Ivan and NOT help the FBI!  Then, oh no, it looks like the FBI is right about him!  Then Ivan is threatening Richie's father!   Then a couple of Richie's programmer friends are involved! Then...zzzzzz.  It's all just hard to keep track of, and not that interesting. 

This movie had potential to be interesting and fun.  Instead, it was just kind of boring.  Like I said, disappointing.