Runner Runner (2013)

Runner Runner arrives in 2013 with a title that sounds like a sneaker and a premise that sounds like a cautionary pamphlet about offshore gambling. Brad Furman directs Justin Timberlake as a Princeton graduate student who flies to Costa Rica to accuse Ben Affleck of cheating at online poker, and then, in a development the screenplay treats as inevitable, accepts a job from him. The film is a crime thriller of the standard model, assembled with competence and released to reviews that ranged from indifferent to hostile. It grossed sixty-two million dollars, which is the sort of figure that ends conversations.

The film's cultural temperature is tepid. Anthony Mackie appears as an FBI agent, and Yul Vazquez and James Molina fill supporting roles, giving the cast a demographic spread that the movie neither remarks upon nor builds anything from. Gemma Arterton's Rebecca eventually betrays Ivan, an act of agency that lasts roughly as long as it takes to advance the plot, after which she resumes her function as romantic furniture. The screenplay gestures at Wall Street greed and an offshore Ponzi scheme, though its target is the crooked man rather than the arrangement that made him rich. There is no sermonizing here. The corruption arrives through beatings, crocodiles, and a bribe to a gaming official, which is to say through action, and the film seems content to let the audience draw whatever conclusions it likes.

Nearly everything else the current cultural moment tends to reward is absent. No environmental conscience. No body politics. No neurodivergent interiority. No reimagining of the historical record, since it has no history to reimagine. Its moral universe is the familiar one of crime cinema, where bad men do bad things and the protagonist learns to be slightly worse than he was at the start. The result is a film of modest social awareness and even more modest merit, a specimen best filed under period-appropriate, and left there.