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60Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.
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58Could have been a fun film, but instead merely displays the trappings of one.
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50Ben Affleck makes for a pretty good jerk, but he can’t pull off outright villainy. That’s probably the main problem with the crime thriller Runner Runner.
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50Various subplots are given short shrift and the whole thing feels more like a Cliff's Notes version of a longer piece than an actual finished motion picture.
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Oct 4, 201350The kind of meat-and-potatoes genre picture that might be passable if the people involved in making it had given the same thought and concentration to the development of the plot and the ending as they did to the fairly involving set-up.
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50Even the best player can only go so far with a bum hand.
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Oct 4, 201350The ultimately forgettable Runner Runner is, for a gambling film, markedly risk-averse.
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50After an intriguing setup, “Runner Runner” devolves into a by-the-books thriller.
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50The struggles in the movie are with the moments when life and liberty are on the line. The ones that should put you on the edge of your seat are more likely to have you glancing at your watch.
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50In different hands, Runner Runner might have worked as sleazy tropical noir, but director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) never quite embraces the tawdriness of his material.
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50One of the film's biggest problems is that Richie is an unsympathetic and rather dim character. The badly drawn role does the likable Timberlake no favors.
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50Runner Runner is content to stay high gloss, with no filler.
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50The best parts of Runner Runner feel like a Rounders facsimile—right down to the metaphor-heavy narration—and the worst seem like a case of mission drift, as if the filmmakers set out to make a behind-the-curtain thriller about online gambling, but got hung up in paying off the plot.
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40Thrillers don’t come much more nondescript than this: If Runner Runner were a color scheme, it would be beige, with an accent wall in taupe.
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40This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.
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40This is the kind of movie that, in order to puff itself up, quotes Meyer Lansky, Napoleon and Native American sayings. But according to Hoyle — as poker players would say — the film really just does boilerplate Hollywood drama.
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40However exotic the locations and starry the stars, there’s no escaping this is The Devil’s Advocate of online gambling. Fold.
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Sep 26, 201340Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck give their best poker faces but ultimately fail to convince you to gamble your cash away on this limp, unoriginal story of a man out of his depth.
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40This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions.
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40Runner Runner’s appeal increases dramatically whenever Affleck enters the frame.
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38Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.
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38Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.
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38Remember the old Ben Affleck, the one who made 28 consecutive bad movies before he turned out to be a pretty good director? He’s back! Behold, the second coming of . . . Badfleck.
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38The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.
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38When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.
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37The film might take its name from poker subculture, but it lacks all the urgency, single-mindedness and swiftness that the title implies at its most literal. Runner Runner is a bummer. Bummer.
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30It feels like a halfhearted bluff and has the stale smell of yesterday’s after-shave.
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30What's actually up onscreen in this vaguely ambitious but tawdry melodrama falls into an in-between no-man's-land that endows it with no distinction whatsoever, a work lacking both style and insight into the netherworld it seeks to reveal.
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25The actors hit the jackpot, but only in terms of their paychecks. The audience gets a tension-free, tight-assed, "Casino" ripoff that leaves them thoroughly fleeced.
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25Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.
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25In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?
User score distribution:
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Positive: 0 out of 8
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Mixed: 5 out of 8
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Negative: 3 out of 8
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Oct 8, 20133
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Oct 8, 20135
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Oct 7, 20135