This weekend I went and saw the movie Runner Runner and it was a fair action movie. To me the biggest problem was that I never really care for or like the main character Richie Furst, played by Justin Timberlake, so whether or not he succeeded didn't really matter to me. This movie starts with him at grad school at Princeton, where he is getting a commission for getting people to gamble on a website owned by Ivan Block, played by Ben Affleck. Richie gets in trouble for this from the school so he has to gamble his last bit of money to try and get enough money to pay for his schooling, decides not to pull out of any games and loses it all. The movie is set up on this and as an audience member I am suppose to feel sorry for him. This this geniuses kind of guy in his undefined twenties, lost his money, decided to get his masters at a expensive school that he cant afford, and then makes stupid decisions at on online poker game, which he assumes he was cheated on and uses the lab at Princeton to figure out the some of the people he played against winning levels were way above the average they should have been. They only thing that kinda gets you to feel for him or like him is that his dad John Furst, played by John Heard, is a way down on his luck addicted gambler. So getting over that I didn't really like the main character, which is usually important in this movie because you want him to be able to get one past the bad guy, Richie goes down to Costa Rica to confront Ivan about the cheating on his site, Ivan offers Richie a job working at his casino down there, and then the FBI get on Richie to try and force him to help them bring Ivan down. Even though Richie is a genus at what he does, he has trouble seeing how this will go bad and continues to work for Richie, falls for a Rebecca, played by Gemma Arterton, a women who works for Ivan but Richie thinks would be good to go after. Richie makes lots of stupid decisions gets sucked into all the crap that is going on and then has to try and see if he can get out of it before he is eaten by the wolves, or in this movie the crocodile.
Besides the fact that Richie is not a likable character, the movie is basically pretty standard fare when it comes to this type of action movie. There is nothing really surprising about the plot or what happens but then there is also nothing that is super annoying or that pisses me off. If I cared a lick about Richie and he was a little more naïve in the beginning of the movie (as in he was suckered in, not walked in with everything being very obvious) it would have been a more solid overall movie.
I think that the supporting cast was very good and I think Ben Affleck was great as Ivan, and it was really nice to see John Heard in the movie. I feel as if Rebecca wasn't really needed but thrown in just to have a female around all of the guys. Not liking the character of Richie was disappointing because I don't usually mind Justin Timberlake as an actor.
One of the big pluses of this movie is that it kept my interest throughout the movie and I wasn't bored during it.
Basically this movie was a fair action movie, and compared to the others movies of similar plot line this year it holds up pretty comparable.
My Rating: 2-
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