I’m a fan of Justin Timberlake the actor. From his legendary status on Saturday Night Live to his unsung performance in The Social Network, he deserves the recognition he gets. But Runner, Runner is not his strongest performance. The same can be said for Batman-to-be, Ben Affleck. The film follows Timberlake’s character, a monetarily struggling grad student who loses his small amount of money in online poker. Since he’s a genius, he figures out he was cheated and goes to confront the tycoon responsible, Affleck. Intrigued by the big paydays offered to him, he accepts a position with the company whose dealings aren’t quite legal.
After a few strong performances, which were relatively subdued, Affleck’s character is full of big monologues and over-the-top moments. Affleck does well with it and is believable even though he usually plays the good guy. His bad guy persona is pretty intriguing. Timberlake’s character develops throughout the film, as we expect a lead character to do. Yet for a genius, he learns pretty slowly, especially when he gets set up on a few separate occasions.
Timberlake is a talented actor, but he continues his recent trend of sounding like he’s reading his lines for the first time on screen. It may be the fact that he is so natural in certain settings that when he’s forced to show range it’s a bit forced. We all know comedy sketch and talk show JT, so since he sounds different in drama, it’s noticeable. I still think he’ll have an Oscar in the next few years though. Runner, Runner is a compelling story filled with adequate twists and turns. The drama of the poker and gambling is underutilized in place of character development by repetition, which gets a bit old. To say the movie is predictable would be unfair because there are surprises, but after the fact I’m surprised I didn’t see what was coming.
Each film earns either zero, a half or a full arrow in five categories. The categories are Acting, Writing/Directing, Emotion, Innovation and Overall Impression. The arrows are added up to equal the full score.
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