This past week the $10,000 World Series of Poker Main Event wrapped up at the Rio in Las Vegas, with the final table of nine individuals competing to see who would take home the first-place grand prize of $8.3 million dollars.
On that note -- now is as good a time as any to focus my movie column on poker movies. In this case, it is Runner Runner, which debuted a few weeks back and stars Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake and Gemma Arterton.
Runner Runner got particular mention during the WSOP. I noticed ads promoting the movie were strategically placed in the Penn and Teller Theater, right where the Main Event final table was, when I was watching the final table action on TV.
The movie itself, directed by Brad Thurman, comes from the screenwriting team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the same pair who brought you Rounders. That's the iconic 1999 piece starring Matt Damon and Ed Norton about the world of poker -- not so much the glamorous world of high stakes poker at the casinos, but the underground world away from the bright lights and ESPN cameras.
Rounders is considered by its fans to be among the greatest poker movies of all time because it precisely captured the look and feel of the game and the atmosphere. Runner Runner, though, is a much different movie in that it focuses on the more modern and shady world of offshore online poker sites.
The hero of Runner Runner is a Princeton college student named Richie Furst (Timberlake) who plays for his tuition money on an offshore poker site for which he is also an affiliate. He ends up getting cheated out of his bankroll in a game on the site, and winds up heading down to Costa Rica to confront the site's CEO Ivan Block, played by Affleck. Instead, he's offered a job, and he ends up entangled in the murky and shady dealings of this guy and his crew.
Meanwhile, the FBI ends up going down to Costa Rica to try and get Furst's cooperation to capture Block and shut him down.
If this storyline sounds familiar, it should. It closely mirrors what's been going on in events in the offshore gambling/online poker world of the past few years.
The fictional online site of this movie, Midnight Black, bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet offshore operation that was eventually shut down. Where was AP/UB located? Costa Rica.
That game in which Timberlake's character was cheated out of his money sounds awfully similar to what went on during the Ultimate Bet superuser cheating scandal of a few years ago, where software was used to spy on other players' cards to allow opponents to take all the players' money.
The talk in the movie about how Block was running a "Ponzi scheme" echoes the sort of talk the US Department of Justice was leveling towards another notorious offshore site, Full Tilt Poker, in the last couple of years.
The larger-than-life Ivan Block character, on the run from the USA authorities, seems awfully similar to the real-life Calvin Ayre, the founder of Bodog. Ayre built an offshore gambling empire, threw wild parties that featured lots of girls, was and is constantly on the run from US authorities, and likes yachts. Just like Ivan Block. Incidentally, you may be interested to know where Ayre is from originally. It's none other than Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. You know, that place just down highway 16 to the west.
The point is that Runner Runner gets a lot of the background material right in terms of locations and its depiction of the online poker world. That's what makes this movie even more of a disappointment because of the many, many things it gets wrong.
First, there's issues with this storyline of how this guy is trying to stay in school by earning money from poker. It did not mirror what was really happening in the real world of online poker, because so many college kids who were good at poker were actually quitting school in droves to pursue it full-time. They were saying "to hell with having to pay tuition, to hell with exams! I'm going to play poker and make my fortune, and live the good life right now!" That was what was really going on.
Anyway, that's a minor point. The main problem with Timberlake's character is that he is an idiot. First, he risks his tuition on one online poker game. No good online poker player worth his salt would do something so utterly irresponsible. Second of all, he's cheated out of his money, but when he goes down to Costa Rica to get it back, he's seduced by the whole offshore gaming lifestyle and is quick to accept this job with the Midnight Black website!
Would you seriously go work at an offshore gambling website when you were just cheated out of thousands upon thousands of dollars? Think about it.
Then there was this whole subplot with these obnoxious FBI agents who were down in Costa Rica trying to shut Block and his operation down. These unsympathetic characters just added to a movie full of unsympathetic characters.
The problem with the FBI storyline is that there are far easier ways to shut an offshore poker site down than to send the FBI to Costa Rica. It would have been far easier for US law enforcement to simply stay at home and seize the domain name instead.
Which, in the real world, is exactly what they did. Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet, Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars were shut down in exactly this sort of fashion on April 15, 2011.
If the FBI agents in Runner Runner were actually good at their jobs, all they needed to do was seize the domain name, and Ivan Block would've been out of business. But that would have too easy for Hollywood. It would have ended the movie right in the middle of the opening credits.
As for the acting, I didn't have a problem with Justin Timberlake playing Richie Furst. My problem was with Richie Furst. I wasn't sympathetic for his character one bit given the stupid decisions he was making. Gemma Arterton was gorgeous in her red dress, but that's all she was memorable for in this movie. Her talents were pretty much wasted. As for Ben Affleck, for all the bashing he's taken recently for landing the Batman role, the fact is he is capable of playing a good role occasionally. He was good in Argo, for instance, but in this one Affleck looked like just another actor drawing a paycheck. Ivan Block looked like Ben Affleck playing a bad guy.
Costa Rica sucks! That's all that can be said about what ought to have been an exciting and exotic locale for a movie about offshore gaming. Its depiction could not have been more boring. By the way, that is not even the real Costa Rica in the movie. It's Puerto Rico.
That sums up Runner Runner, which really was a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. The movie is like a poker game where you go in expecting good hands but are dealt a lot of rags instead.
It also means Rounders remains, to this day, the definitive movie of the poker genre. Still, it looks like Koppelman and Levien are undaunted by their latest experience. Rumors continue to fly that the two of them are going to try a Rounders 2 sequel at some point.
Hopefully they'll have more luck with that effort than with Runner Runner, because a lot of people -- especially poker players -- want to see another good, compelling poker movie made. I'm personally hoping they'll give it a shot. Even despite Runner Runner's flaws, it's pretty clear these two know the poker world very, very well. They know the subject matter. All they need to do is come up with a movie that's just as compelling.
