| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 2014 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
18
Mixed:
18
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Nov 11, 2014
This is a film that is quietly confident. Everything's well-composed. Everything's put together right. There's a very sure hand on the wheel here, and at this point, I'm sold on Rupert Wyatt as a guy who can tell a story with a certain kind of intelligence, both towards his subject and towards his audience.
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The GuardianNov 23, 2014
This spiral of self-imposed despair feels like part three of a trilogy of American financial darkness after Killing Them Softly and The Counsellor. The Gambler isn’t quite so audience-unfriendly, but those looking for a typical Wahlberg thriller might come away disappointed. Others looking for a less sure bet might reap the rewards.
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Dec 23, 2014
Dialogue, we seem to have forgotten, matters, and the words — by the brutally funny screenwriter of “The Departed,” William Monahan — are electric eels, slithering and sinister and nasty. They sneak up and sting you, or sometimes tickle your toes. Lowlifes don’t actually talk this way? Yeah. But if only they did.
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Dec 27, 2014
Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist’s dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power.
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Dec 23, 2014
The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.
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Movie NationDec 22, 2014
As meaty as this script sounds — every line another morsel — it never allows Wahlberg the chance to make us care what happens to Jim. Do we want him to get what’s coming to him, or are we rooting for him? Either way, Wyatt, Monahan and Wahlberg succeed only in frustrating our will, cashing out with a cop-out finale, making our two hour gamble on The Gambler something less than a sure thing.
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Dec 23, 2014
Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.
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RogerEbert.comDec 27, 2014
Nov 11, 2014
A cover version is pretty much what this do-over of The Gambler represents, with the rougher edges mixed out and sweetened. It's no mystery why actors and directors want to relive the magic of American studio movies from the fabled 1970s, but if you're not going to take the risks that the originals did, or illuminate as much about the characters, why redo them at all?
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Dec 24, 2014
You can't get close to Bennett — not because he's a morally ambiguous character, as the movie would have you believe, but because he never puts anything on the table. He struts through every consequence, a man with nothing to lose because he never had anything worth losing in the first place.
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Dec 17, 2014
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