Writer and film-maker James Toback has had a mini-resurgence lately: his documentary Seduced and Abandoned was widely enjoyed, and Jacques Audiard remade his 1978 movie Fingers as The Beat My Heart Skipped. Now 1974’s Toback-scripted The Gambler has had a modern – rather sanitised – makeover, transposed from New York to LA. It’s another tellingly personal tale of a highbrow guy with a lowlife secret.
Mark Wahlberg plays the part that James Caan had in the original. He is Jim Bennett, a university professor and novelist with an addiction to gambling. Wahlberg is, sad to say, uncharismatic and unconvincing in a tiresome role in which he has to harangue his students on the subject of true genius. On his personal time, he loses a fortune at blackjack, and finally stakes everything on a plan to persuade one of his students to throw a high-stakes college basketball game.
In many ways, it’s interesting to see a 70s-style movie, with its long conversational takes, transposed to a modern setting, although a 21st-century gambler might actually find it more convenient to blow it all online. Mark Wahlberg’s designer-suited performance is shallow and self-admiring, however, and William Monahan (who wrote The Departed) devises a new narrative direction which is contrived and preposterous. There are one or two nice, Elmore-Leonard-ish cracks about the movie business.
