Ben Affleck And Justin Timberlake To Star In Poker Film Runner, Runner

[bukowski72]

There were many reviews that said this was the worst film of 2013. I think Sylvia may play online more than you think.

"I started out playing online, and did that for 2.5 years professionally before black friday. I played a lot of 1/2-2/4 for my first couple years before finally dedicating a TON of time to working on my game and moving up. I was generally playing 5/10-10/20 when black friday hit. At that point, I had already moved to LV and just started playing live more."


Slyvia said in the MTV show that his cash game winnings helped negate the costs of his tournament play. Slyvia also was somewhat unhappy with what MTV left on the edit room floor:

"Post editing, I think it came off more as me saying OMG I HAVE TO WIN MILLIONS MORE OR I'LL BE BROKE SOON. I actually sat down at the end and explained why I did the show- to show a more accurate picture of a traveling professional poker player looks like- but mtv cut that part because it was deemed "too direct to the viewers" or something like that."

Jesse show up starting with post 146.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...8/index10.html

[Dan Druff]

So I finally watched the actual movie tonight.

The 1-sentence review: Not good by any means, but not bad to the point where it should be considered the worst movie of 2013.

Mild spoilers below. Won't bother to put it in a spoiler tag because I doubt anyone here gives a shit.

Basically, it had potential to be a decent movie, but haphazard storytelling (or editing, hard to tell which) made it difficult to follow and hard to get into the story.

The first thing I noticed was that the Timberlake character getting cheated and subsequently deciding to go to Costa Rica happened WAY too quickly. Like, it seemed 5 minutes into the movie, he was on a plane for Costa Rica. They tried some weak premise about him almost getting kicked out of Princeton for being an online poker affiliate (what?), and then they show him get cheated by a superuser.

Rather than showing a few actual online poker hands where he's being cheated, instead they leave us on the other side of the computer monitor where we can't see the screen, with Timberlake shouting things like, "What? Every time I'm weak, he's raising, and every time I'm strong, he's folding!" The play is filled with a lot of poker jargon which is understandable to people in our community but must have baffled the general public.

You never see Timberlake even bust his account. It quickly snaps to a previously-unseen black kid, explaining to Timberlake (in more poker jargon) that he was cheated, finally ending with a line stolen from Michael Josem's 60 Minutes interview: "The chances of him getting that lucky is like hitting the Powerball lottery 4 times in a row."

Suddenly, Timberlake's character (named Richie Furst, clearly a reference to Full Tilt part-owner Rafe Furst) is off to Costa Rica to confront the owner of the site where he got cheated.

Seriously, all of this happens in like the first 5 minutes of the movie. You don't have time to feel bad for Richie's predicament in school, or even to feel the frustration of his being cheated out of all of his money by a superuser. It happens so quickly that you come away with the feeling as if the entire opening scene is just a gratuitous way to move the entire setting to Costa Rica.

The part where Richie arrives in Costa Rica and finally confronts the site owner (Ivan Block, played by Affleck) is mildly interesting, and temporarily gave me some hope that the movie might be decent. Richie gets his attention at an elaborate nighttime pool party that bore striking similarity to the yearly pool party at the UB Aruba event, which I attended in 2007.

Once Richie is convinced to join Block and come work for him, the movie pretty much goes in the toilet. There seems to be some brick-and-mortar casino also being run by Block. Why is an online casino pioneer also running a small brick-and-mortar casino, and who are its customers supposed to be in a non-touristy area of Costa Rica? This is never explained, but you constantly see everyone walking through the casino, perhaps just to give the film more of a "glitzy gambling" look.

There is too much talk of the whole affiliate business in the movie during the entire first half. The average moviegoer has no idea what a poker affiliate is, and this whole thing wasn't necessary at all to the plot. At one point, Richie is instructed to blackmail some super-affiliate currently associated with UB (lol) and get him to switch his allegiance to their site.
However, about halfway in, you never hear another peep about Richie or any of the other affiliates.

An overzealous FBI agent eventually kidnaps Richie and demands he cooperate with an investigation against Block. This FBI agent is over-the-top and not realistic at all, even by TV-FBI-agent standards. Other films and TV shows have done this premise many times (FBI pressures/blackmails hero to turn on the corrupt people he's working for), but this version of it was done very poorly. The agent keeps haphazardly popping in and out of the story, and worst yet, it is pretty much accepted throughout the entire film that he's powerless and has no jurisdiction in Costa Rica.

There are many characters in the film who are never introduced or explained, and it leaves you scratching your head for awhile to figure exactly what's going on. I don't know if this was bad editing or just a poorly written story.

Now I'll give the biggest spoiler, so I'll put it in spoiler tags...

 

The worst thing about this film is that the entire premise of the movie made no sense, once the viewer gets to the end and learns everything that's going on.

Remember "The Sixth Sense", where you learn a major surprise at the end which fits in with everything weird that had happened earlier in the movie?

"Runner Runner" is pretty much the opposite.

Basically, it comes out that Block was stealing all of the money on deposit, Full-Tilt-style, and had stolen so much that he planned to flee Costa Rica soon.

If so, why was he having a major affiliate convention at the beginning of the movie, attempting to attract business to a site he's about to close?

Why was he bothering to run superusers on a site where almost all of the money on deposit had already been stolen?

It's never even explained whether the superusers were really rogue programmers (as Block claimed) or actually Block himself. It is sort of implied that Block stole from Richie intentionally to set the entire thing up, but how could he know that Riche's reaction would be coming to Costa Rica personally?

Finally, Gemma Arterton and Justin Timberlake really had no chemistry, and their romance seemed forced. It was never clear why she developed such feelings for him, as they seemed to spend very little time together in the film.

I'm pretty convinced that Koppelman and Levien can't write good poker stories anymore. For whatever reason, they keep regressing after the much-loved Rounders.

I know that they wrote Oceans Thirteen, which was successful and critically well-liked. They also wrote a little-known 2001 film called "Knockaround Guys" which I really enjoyed (though it had nothing to do with gambling/casinos).

However, between the TV show "Tilt" and "Runner Runner", it seems like it's time for them to give up writing scripts about poker.

[LLL]

"Tilt" was awesome.

Terrible but awesome.

[DRK Star]

Druff,

I would think that if the guy was going to steal from his own business, he would invite all the high rollers to keep up the premise that everything was going well at his company and also to ensure that they deposited MORE money into it so he can rob that additional money later.

[abrown83]

Druff,

I would think that if the guy was going to steal from his own business, he would invite all the high rollers to keep up the premise that everything was going well at his company and also to ensure that they deposited MORE money into it so he can rob that additional money later.

*cough Full Tilt cough*

[Texter]

Just watched this thing…was ok.

Timberlake goes from college kid to executive at the online casino in 5 seconds….they could have at least said….”within 18 months, I was running the marketing of the online casino…etc”

The fbi guy and Affleck were over the top ridiculous….

And his buddy specifically hid stuff in his bran flakes because “it’s the only food the maids don’t steal”….but he hides the thumb drive in the honey bunches of oats…which are delicious. Lazy lazy movie.

[Dan Druff]

Two years ago, Koppelman decided to fire off a series of tweets about this failed movie, blaming things on the studio. While I'm sure the studio did some stupid things and probably made his script worse, there's no way he can lay most of the blame regarding this turd at others' feet.

Just own it. You wrote a shitty movie, and the poker boom ruined your ability to write about poker.

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[Dan Druff]

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Somehow he thinks that Deadmau5 is "Danger Mouse", the latter of which was a cartoon in the '80s.

[Dan Druff]

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Then 3 months later...

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[Sloppy Joe]

No longer watch Billions but thought it was hilarious that they basically casted Malkovich as billionaire Teddy KGB.

Never seen Runner Runner but a poker movie in 2013 sounds brutal. Poker scenes in TV and movies rarely play well for me.

[Sanlmar]

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Then 3 months later...

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Back in the day I remember listening to Koppelman talk about how Billions came to be. The lunches he was granted with hedge fund guys. The research and background. All that. Great stories.

Koppelman is only equaled by Chuck Lorre in his ability to spin show runner stories that keep you riveted and entertained. You witness his sense of humor in the above tweets.

Lorre is god though.

[Sanlmar]

TIL that Koppelman has done a series of “Rewatchables” with Bill Simmons

This makes me very happy.

[Dan Druff]

Back in the day I remember listening to Koppelman talk about how Billions came to be. The lunches he was granted with hedge fund guys. The research and background. All that. Great stories.

Koppelman is only equaled by Chuck Lorre in his ability to spin show runner stories that keep you riveted and entertained. You witness his sense of humor in the above tweets.

Lorre is god though.

See, I don't get that from his tweets. I get a lot of excuse-making -- how Runner Runner could have been a good film, but the studio mucked it up. And that's absolutely false. If he's going to discuss Runner Runner, he needs to admit he just didn't do a good job (and the studio probably made it worse).

I think Koppelman's problem is that he isn't good at storytelling when he assumes the audience already knows a lot about the subject. In the late 90s, hardly anyone played poker, and even fewer people understood Texas Holdem. Koppelman had to teach us about poker and the sleazy underworld surrounding it in NYC. He did so by presenting a fairly realistic story of a regular guy with a talent for poker, who gets himself into all kinds of jams when trying to navigate through that world.

His other two poker projects -- Tilt and Runner Runner -- were over the top and ridiculous. He got away from the beautiful simplicity and realism that we saw in Rounders.

I will give him props for recovering from the Runner Runner disaster, and turning out Billions three years later. It probably helped that he had Oceans Thirteen and Rounders under his belt, but he really is a good comeback story.

[JeffDime]

I guess this is something that basically plagues every movie. I spent a good amount of time in Costa Rica and all the gringos there look a lot more like Phil Nagy than they do Justin Timberlake. I went when things really were not going well for me and I needed a break. Most of the gringos are just a bit off. They typically end up there because they are running away from something. Some of the guys can’t come back to the States ever.

The depiction of Costa Rica and the offshore gaming world was way off. It is more like a bunch of ugly dudes and hookers rather than some extravagant party with models and slick business man. The movie suffered from both bad writing, directing & acting. To say one is more to blame then the other is tough. But bad writing is almost impossible to overcome.

The lack of authenticity doesn’t mean it can’t be a good film. I was part of the underground NYC poker seen in the early/mid 2000s and it was clearly not nearly as depicted in Rounders. Now, Rounders did take place a little before my time but I doubt that many changes happened. For sure Rounders was a great movie. But it did benefit from being before the boom and less was known. One thing for sure is that they had dealers in those underground clubs and Worm wouldn’t be dealing himself for instance.