Directed by: The Safdie Brothers
Starring: Adam Sandler
This film is a brilliant story of a gambling addict, by gambling addict we're not talking about someone who constantly gambles with the money he has, we're talking about a person who gambles with money which he doesn't even has. Howard Ratner is played by a brilliant Adam Sandler. He's an adrenaline junkie, he doesn't want to play safe ever. Howard doesn't want to simply go home and have sex with his partner, he'd rather hide in the house and pretend that he's not home, arouse her through text first and then surprise her. This scene is a brilliant subtext about his character, about how he wants that rush all the time. He should've been a trader, he'd probably be a bad trader but that would've been a better profession for him. I'd have liked to see his childhood or his backstory as to what made him the person he is, the adrenaline junkie that he is. Probably they'd have avoided that because not every person in real life has a scene that happened in their childhood which turned them into what they're.
The craft of the film is noticeable, there's an inherent clumsiness in the cinematography and the editing of the film. It isn't an clumsy that we've to put efforts to figure out what's happening, but it works in stating the mood of the film. A lot of shots are handheld and I can recall a scene in the car before they strip Howard and put him in the trunk. That scene cuts to shot reverse shot very fast and all the shots are almost closes and this nature of the editing and cinematography makes us feel like we're present at the situation there.
There's a lot of unpredictability in the outcome of the bets, because this is a film about a grey character and we'd not expect him to either win the bets or lose them in an obvious way. So we'd keep guessing till the last moment, I liked the ending so much. It's a Breaking Bad arc, the bad guy does good in whatever he does but it is illegal/unethical and he gets defeated or he dies in some other way which punishes him. But had he lost the bet/ had Walter White been killed by some gangster in a fight it'd have been a different story. In this film I was never rooting for this guy, he felt messy and I kind of pitied him all the time unlike let's say a Walter White, whom I was rooting for to get away. But, they didn't even try to do that, so it's alright.
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