"Runner" Goes Nowhere

The build-up to “Runner, Runner” has largely been focused on its stars, with Justin Timberlake in a lead role, pitted against the king of the 2013 Oscars, Ben Affleck. It’s a lucrative duo for sure, and the movie clearly recognizes its assets. But any effort to capitalize on the film’s cast beyond its star power seems half-hearted at best. The film is initially centered on the premise of online gambling dominance (never mind that its heyday was in the mid-2000s, and many sites have since been shut down), but soon retreats from this focus into a tired and unexciting story of a lone man taking down a seemingly untouchable tycoon. There’s a sense of staleness that courses throughout “Runner, Runner,” and neither JT’s baby blues nor Affleck’s smooth delivery can rescue it.

Timberlake ably assumes the role of Richie Furst, a Princeton grad student in finance who is cheated of his savings in an online poker game. Determined to settle the score, Richie impulsively jets off to Costa Rica to confront the website’s elusive founder, the brash and high-rolling Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). Their unlikely meeting quickly and inexplicably propels Richie into the upper echelon of Ivan’s gambling empire, where the traditional hijinks of a thriller/caper movie ensue. There’s plenty of cash, scantily clad women, a love triangle, and even crocodiles. The crocs, in their two minutes of glory, steal the show—bad news for a movie marketed as a thriller with an exotic backdrop and some high-stakes poker. The film draws on what should be exciting material—gambling! Wealth! Intrigue!—but in the end, whether or not Richie escapes his tropical hellhole is beside the point. Nothing in “Runner, Runner” provides ample motivation to care.

The film fails to provide a suitable hero despite its likable lead. Timberlake can only buy so much sympathy, and Richie’s duplicitousness erases that quickly. He is supposedly brilliant, yet puzzlingly trusts Ivan and partakes in the standard practices of shady business—lying, blackmailing, bribing corrupted officials, etc.—without questioning the motives behind them. Flawed protagonists (à la Don Draper or Walter White) are increasingly popular in modern film and television, but cannot succeed without significant character development and complexity. On these fronts, and by no fault of Timberlake’s, the film simply does not deliver. It doesn’t help that Richie’s romance with Ivan’s business (and assumedly more-than-business) partner, Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), has all the sexiness and excitement of stale Wonderbread. One can accept the implausibility of Richie’s arrival in Costa Rica and subsequent employment with Ivan to a point, but he and Rebecca’s lackluster affair is simply bogus, and both undermine the storyline in the end.

To the film’s credit, the cast as a whole performs adequately—rest assured, Timberlake can actually act—and a couple of lines will receive deserved laughs. Affleck, in particular, shines as the perfect embodiment of a leering gambling mogul and punctuates otherwise flat dialogue with smug bits of villainy (regarding blackmail: “You know that voice in the back of your head? That’s not your conscience. That’s fear.”) Timberlake, to his credit, clearly enjoys his time in the spotlight and does a competent job in his role, but he is ultimately working with limited material.

Combined with the film’s overarching implausibility from beginning to end, there isn’t a lot worth seeing, and certainly not much worth paying to see in theaters. “Runner, Runner” never promises to be anything more than a formula thriller, but it does presume to be entertaining. Barring a few decent lines, the sketchy, bland storyline renders the film anything but. Its poker face can only fool the audience for so long, and an abundance of unrealistic moments eventually forces it to fold.