Wild Card (2015)

Wild Card arrives as a remake of a 1986 Burt Reynolds picture, itself pulled from William Goldman's 1985 novel Heat, and it carries the dust of that lineage on its shoulders. Simon West directs Jason Statham through the neon grime of Las Vegas, where Nick Wild chaperones tourists, dodges mobsters, and loses half a million dollars at a blackjack table in a single sitting. The film was a box office bust, earning a fraction of its budget, and the critics were unkind. None of this is a scandal. It is a mid-budget crime picture doing mid-budget crime picture things.

The plot offers a rape-revenge thread involving Holly, an escort beaten by a gangster and his men, and the film handles it as a procedural errand: find the men, corner them, collect the cash. No sermon is attached. The supporting cast includes women and Latino performers, Sofia Vergara and Dominik Garcia among them, and they move through the story as people rather than as statements. Gambling addiction is depicted as a compulsion with consequences, not as a clinical condition awaiting a diagnosis. The mobsters are mobsters. The rich man is a rich man. Nothing here pauses to instruct us on how to feel about any of it.

We searched, as is our duty, for the markers of contemporary social consciousness: the representation casting, the identity themes, the climate anxiety, the critique of capital, the body politics, the neurodiversity framing, the historical revisionism, the lecture. We found none. This is a film about a tough man in a hot city who solves problems with cutlery. By the standards of our ledger it is a clean sheet, and there is something almost restful in that. The classification is complete. The vintage is dry, unremarkable, and entirely of its own era.