Remember the old Ben Affleck, the one who made 28 consecutive bad movies before he turned out to be a pretty good director? He’s back! Behold, the second coming of . . . Badfleck.
Ben, bless his impressive directorial skills, on camera still looks only vaguely responsive to external stimuli, as if he’s waiting for his turn at the keg at the University of Vermont. He plays offshore gambling tycoon Ivan Block, as in block of wood. That’d be soft wood, like pine, or maybe balsa.
At Block’s not-quite-legal outfit in Costa Rica, he meets a furious customer, Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake), who feels cheated by the computer poker program he used to play at Princeton. Instead of having him immediately shot, Block becomes the first casino owner ever to admit cheating, then offers Richie a job, supposedly because he fears the mighty power of a Princeton student spreading rumors about the integrity of his site.
At other times, though, we’re supposed to think Block is some sort of online Scarface, though given that it’s Affleck he’s more like Blankface. As a random girl (Gemma Arterton) who doesn’t seem particularly fascinating to either man flits in and out of the scenery, Affleck and Timberlake face each other down, each trying to outmuscle and outscam the other. At no point does either of them seem at all dangerous. It’s like a cockfight between declawed pussycats.
Timberlake babbles about algorithms, and we’re supposed to buy Affleck as the kind of man who feeds his enemies to crocodiles. Affleck wants us to think Robert De Niro in “Casino,” but I was more scared of Robert De Niro in “Little Fockers.”
When Richie gets in too deep, an FBI man (Anthony Mackie) offers him a possible way out if he’ll turn rat, but Richie has a better idea: He’ll simply bribe everyone in the country. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work, since Block has already been bribing everyone for years, with a million times more money and firepower than Richie has, but maybe everyone in Costa Rica really liked “D - - k in a Box.” By the way, at what point will Hollywood realize that a five-minute video isn’t quite as useful as five feature-length films in determining whether Timberlake is a movie star? He isn’t. He’s proven it. Let’s retire him and give Lance Bass a chance.
I’ll give the movie credit for coming up with a few lines of nasty dialogue and cool-sounding poker slang. There’s also one brilliant joke: Mackie’s FBI man tells Richie he loves to bust Princeton men. Pause. “I went to Rutgers.”
But the director, Brad Furman, never manages to stir up any excitement or menace. How can we blame him when the script calls for Affleck to gaze manfully at Timberlake and say, “I look at you and I see myself. You’ve got the same f - - k-you look in your eye.” Can you think of any two actors who have less danger coming out of their eyeballs? OK, maybe Michael Cera and Neil Patrick Harris, but you don’t see either of them trying to play a hard case.
Possibly the most honest moment of the film comes when, offered a single-malt scotch, Timberlake’s character says no thanks, he’ll just stick with his Bud Light. Bud Light is fizzy, it’s low-potency, it’s completely lacking in flavor. It’s Justin Timberlake in a can. As for Affleck, he’s equally useless as an actor but in a throwback way: cinematic Zima.