![]() At long last he decides to strike back, yet his climactic master plan - teased for the last half-hour through mysterious meetings and payoffs - is forehead-slappingly elementary. The proscribed character arc here seems to be the slow process by which greed and accumulated compromises allow innocents to work their way deeper into the heart of corruption, but for all his supposed genius, Richie ultimately registers as a rather dim bulb, continually flailing at the obvious lifelines the script keeps throwing him. But the film still has nearly an hour left, so Richie dutifully heads back into his mentor’s questionable embrace. And all doubts would seem to have been erased when an FBI agent (Anthony Mackie) accosts Richie to enlist his help in Block’s imminent criminal takedown. ![]() His second comes when he watches a cackling Block feed chicken carcasses to the pet crocodiles in his backyard. His first clue comes when Block approvingly cites Meyer Lansky as an ethical exemplar. Piece by piece, however, Richie begins to suspect his boss may not be an entirely legitimate businessman. Like “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Runner Runner” displays a wealth of show-offy camera techniques that are never quite narratively necessary, but Furman does well to stage Richie’s giddy ascent into the upper echelons of the third-world nouveau riche, replete with stacks of cash, flashy cars, top-shelf liquor (though Richie prefers Bud Light, with whom Timberlake coincidentally has a sponsorship deal) and fancy dames, none fancier than Block’s main squeeze, Rebecca ( Gemma Arterton). Impressed with Richie’s moxie, Block offers him a job. As absurd coincidence would have it, Richie happens to arrive in San Jose on the same weekend as a bacchanalian annual gambler’s convention, and he takes his case to the highest level. “I can’t let short-term variance slow me down,” Richie pledges in a representative example of the film’s stilted voiceover dialogue, yet despite his gambler’s-son credentials and immense mathematical intelligence (as we’re frequently told yet never shown), he’s taken for all he’s worth through circumstances that a buddy statistician tells him are about as probable as winning the lottery four times in a row.īearing evidence of this cheating, Richie heads off to Costa Rica to confront the poker company’s jet-setting CEO Ivan Block (Affleck), who’s been running his empire from abroad. Attempting to pay tuition by hustling fellow students for an online poker company, Richie’s extracurriculars are quickly quashed by Princeton’s crusty old dean, which leaves the young man forced to wager his life’s savings on a round of digital Texas Hold ’Em to stay in school. Starring as a Princeton grad student of indeterminate age, Timberlake plays Richie Furst, a former Wall Street striver whose young career was derailed by the 2008 meltdown.
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