Sunday 6 October 2013

Runner, Runner (2013)



Greetings fellow readers, it has been a while since I wrote here. I've been super busy after my Pulp Fiction review. Trust me, senior year ain't as easy as people say it is, it's HELL! But anyways, in the midst of all the late nights I spent studying and the slow paced school weeks, I actually manged to go to the cinema! I know, it may sound stupid, but you wouldn't know how relaxing it was for me to go to the theater and forget about life for almost 2 hours. So yeah, I watched Runner, Runner  the other day starring Justin Timberlake, the incredibly gorgeous Gamma Arterton, and Ben Affleck. The story is basically about a man named Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake) who gets cheated in an online poker game, so he decides to go meet the biggest face in online poker, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck) to get his money back. Instead he gets a job offer from Block himself, little does he know that he is gonna get into a world of trouble...

Until this moment, I don't know how to feel about this movie. Was my mind tricked into all the glamour and galore of the movie that it overlooked all it's mistakes? Well, no. But truth be told, I did like the fact that the movie reminded me of the summer for some reason. All the glamour and the beautiful scenery made me remember the amazing times I had in the summer of 2013. That's about the only good thing I can say about this movie. Oh and Deadmau5 made a cameo, which was awesome!

The thing is, Runner Runner just fails to please me. It's high life, tropical feel is just a mask behind a VERY faulty movie. Ben Affleck was horrible in the movie, seriously, this is not what I expected to witness when I entered the theater; I'm not saying that my expectations were high in the first place, but they weren't set to "horrible" too. It's literally like seeing a totally different person act, I have my doubts that that was actually Ben Affleck, what a disappointment. Runner Runner is a great example of when a studio has some spare money on hand and contracts with some big actors/actresses, they just make a movie for the sake of making a movie. And the plot was so fucking predictable contained no twists whatsoever. Moreover, it felt extremely rushed and poorly executed, it's like they wrote the script a week before filming and they shot everything in one take. That's not how you make a movie man!

I've seen much better movies in my day. Runner Runner is a movie that comes and goes without anyone paying much attention to it. I should be raining fire on this shit-fest, but I'm writing this with my eyes half closed, so pardon me. It goes without saying that I WAS DECEIVED!! I spent my hard earned money on a movie that's supposed to be rented and watched over the weekend, yes, that's how bad it is. It got the "rent" stamp.

Ahmed Almatrook