The Gambler (2014)

The Gambler arrives as a remake of a 1974 film that itself nodded at Dostoevsky, and it carries the intellectual pretensions of that lineage without the corresponding debts of conscience. Mark Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, a literature professor who lectures his students on the impossibility of excellence and then goes out and wagers his life to prove he is right about himself. The classroom scenes carry the heaviest load of sermonizing. Here is a man standing before people who paid tuition, delivering a thesis on failure. The film mistakes volume for argument and hopes we will not notice.

The social consciousness on display is modest and mostly economic. Predatory lending, loan sharks, and the geometry of debt get a workout, though the film treats them as atmosphere instead of indictment. Women exist to be threatened or to write checks. Brie Larson's Amy is a promising student and a waitress at the wrong establishment. Jessica Lange's Roberta is a rich mother with a checkbook and a grudge. Neither drives the story. The cast is white throughout, and the presence of Michael Kenneth Williams and Andre Braugher in supporting roles does not convert the proceedings into a document of racial reckoning. Nobody in this film has a body, a diagnosis, or a climate.

What remains is a study of a man who cannot stop. His self-destruction is presented as a flaw of character, not a condition to be named, and the film shows no interest in the vocabulary of diagnosis. The result is a lean, well-acted, faintly exhausting crime drama that wants credit for its literacy. Wahlberg carries it. The film does not quite earn the quotation marks around its title.