Tag: Gemma Arterton

‘Runner Runner’ Runs on Empty

In terms of plot and character, Runner Runner leaves a lot to be desired. Justin Timberlake plays Richie Furst (Rich First, come on), an online gambler who has to risk it all to earn enough tuition to complete his master’s degree at Princeton. After realizing the scam behind a suspicious loss, he finds himself sucked into the seedy poker underbelly of Costa Rica and under the thumb of his ruthless American boss, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). They get territorial over shared one-dimensional love interest Rebecca (Gemma Arterton) to add some manliness. An FBI agent (Anthony Mackle) tries to blackmail Richie with exile in order to take out Block. Eighty percent of the movie is Justin Timberlake looking confused or angry while other people monologue at him. We are supposed to really care about whether or not Richie makes it out of there before the house of cards comes crashing down, despite the fact that he has little to no character depth. Block really likes alligators. Conclusion: Internet poker is even more of a snooze fest than I originally thought.

Runner Runner promotional poster.
Runner Runner promotional poster.

 

Written by Erin Tatum.

In terms of plot and character, Runner Runner leaves a lot to be desired. Justin Timberlake plays Richie Furst (Rich First, come on), an online gambler who has to risk it all to earn enough tuition to complete his master’s degree at Princeton. After realizing the scam behind a suspicious loss, he finds himself sucked into the seedy poker underbelly of Costa Rica and under the thumb of his ruthless American boss, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). They get territorial over shared one-dimensional love interest Rebecca (Gemma Arterton) to add some manliness. An FBI agent (Anthony Mackle) tries to blackmail Richie with exile in order to take out Block. Eighty percent of the movie is Justin Timberlake looking confused or angry while other people monologue at him. We are supposed to really care about whether or not Richie makes it out of there before the house of cards comes crashing down, despite the fact that he has little to no character depth. Block really likes alligators. Conclusion: Internet poker is even more of a snooze-fest than I originally thought.

Richie tries to play it cool.
Richie tries to play it cool.

 

Given the recent media frenzy around the series finale of Breaking Bad, I started to really think about about America’s obsession with (white) white collar crime. It’s no secret that many of our movies and television shows revolve around white guys pulling off meticulous financial schemes or smoothly sauntering their way through government corruption and drug rings. Part of the intended fascination with Runner Runner is the idea that Richie would have to resort to such desperate measures even as a Princeton man. Audiences (particularly white middle-class audiences) are captivated by the idea that all the privilege and power of whiteness and white masculinity sometimes isn’t enough to give you everything you want out of life or, shockingly, control fate. “Turning to the dark side” definitely has a racialized element. Since crime is almost always explicitly coded as nonwhite, especially in media, writers will often go to great lengths to differentiate their protagonist from your run-of-the-mill criminal. As a result, white characters are usually only involved in crimes that are highly cerebral and require an incredible amount of power networking and/or a ridiculously esoteric skill set. Weirdly, Richie represents the epitome of this mindset in his lazy execution. Who needs solid plot or a relatable cast when you get to watch an upper-middle-class white boy throwing his money and future around? Instant scandal!

Block propositions Richie.
Block propositions Richie.

 

The film takes this philosophy and runs with it (har har) in almost laughably stereotypical ways. Upon discovering that he lost all his money in a fixed online poker game, Richie immediately drops everything and flies straight to Costa Rica to confront Block. Block easily seduces him into staying by offering him a hefty salary. If only it were literal seduction, this film would have been a little more interesting. Within three months, Richie is living a comfortable life as Block’s right-hand man. Never mind that he went there not speaking a word of the language and specifically to get the money to pay for his degree. I guess we’re just supposed to assume that his exams and diploma are frozen indefinitely until he decides to return to New Jersey. Welcome to white boy land, where reality can be shaped to cater to your every whim! People of color, both male and female, are used to personify Costa Rica as the nexus of sex and sin. Every other shot shows Richie navigating through substance fueled parties, conversing with greasy, potbellied honchos as they halfheartedly grope gaggles of prostitutes teetering around with champagne. Notably, Richie resists all offers of indulgence with the exception of Rebecca (conveniently a white upper-class woman), designating himself as “pure” and leaving everyone else to be consumed by their own vices. The hypocrisy inherent in such a sentiment is best exemplified when Richie’s father, a doomed gambling addict, nobly offers to sacrifice himself to the bookies so that Richie no longer has baggage preventing his escape. In contrast, the vast majority of people of color who have their lives ruined by similar schemes are portrayed as getting their just desserts.

Rebecca spends a lot of time looking glamorous and contemplative.
Rebecca spends a lot of time looking glamorous and contemplative.

 

Women are also given the short end of the stick, to the point where there is almost nothing to analyze to begin with. Rebecca is the most watered down high-stakes damsel in distress that I’ve seen in recent memory. She may as well be a figment of Richie’s imagination because she only seems to float in and out when he needs advice or encouragement. They have sex once after a flurry of coy banter and beyond that share a few private conversations about the impending implosion of the scam while looking seductive. There is no basis for any alleged emotional connection between them at all. We’re told that Rebecca can’t leave Block and we are meant to feel sympathetic towards her plight, but the narrative never bothers to give her any background, motive, or ambition. Her sole purpose is to reinforce the hero/villain dichotomy between Richie and Block by exaggerating feminine vulnerability. It makes it hard to cheer when Richie and Rebecca finally escape Block’s clutches and fly off on a private jet into the sunset. This couple is about as compelling as a pair of used napkins.

If the film had actually taken the time to examine the inner workings of online gambling, it may have been suspenseful or at the very least informative. Instead, we are forced to contend with lukewarm machismo and endless male posturing from start to finish. Director Brad Furman really should’ve known when to fold.

 

Bitch Slapped: Female Violence in ‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’

Written by: Rachel Redfern

Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Watching the trailer for this year’s latest fairy tale redux, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters it, wasn’t a difficult thing to judge the film as a clichéd action movie with a bad plot and a ridiculous title: we were not wrong to do so. However, the large amount of female characters makes it at least an interesting movie to review. While the world of Hansel and Gretel does feature men, few of the main characters are and in an interesting twist for an action movie, female characters outnumber the male ones. The movie even passes the Bechdel test ironically.

So, here’s a quick breakdown of the film, which probably isn’t necessary except for the sake of a well-organized essay. Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are siblings who are led out into the forest by their parents where they are promptly abandoned. Hansel and Gretel kill the evil witch who tries to eat Hansel and become famous witch hunters, until they end up in a town where multiple children have been taken by a trio of witches to be used for an evil ritual. Violence and one-liners ensue and Hansel and Gretel come to understand themselves and their own history better.

The film plays out like a video game: it’s violence graphic and exaggerated. Personally, I haven’t seen this many heads blown off of bodies since an ill-fated viewing of Rambo IV (2008). People are ripped to shreds, brutally beaten, squished to death, explode and any number of implausible and gory ways to die. 

Jeremy Renner taking part in an improbable action scene

But again, despite Hansel and his overwhelming hatred of witches (of which there seem to be only women—no evil warlocks in this franchise), the only other men featured are a simple mayor, an abusive sheriff (Peter Stormare), a pleasant troll and an overzealous fan of Hansel and Gretel’s work (Thomas Mann).

Gemma Arterton is the other side of the bad-ass Hansel and Gretel team, starring as an appropriately aggressive Gretel. I like a spunky heroine and while Hansel does have to save her towards the end of the movie, she does drive home the final killing blow, so overall I suppose there was great equality in their violent slaughter of the witches.

On to the point, I am not opposed to female villains: I support equal-opportunity in my evil masterminds and if you’re going to have a lot of classic male villains (Lex Luther in Superman, Scar from The Lion King, Batman’s Joker), there should also be some equally evil females running around (Ursula in The Little Mermaid, the Borg Queen from Star Trek, Poison Ivy for Batman).

However, in this respect Hansel and Gretel is over the top, just as it is in pretty much every other way. But it is interesting, the violence committed by these female villains and against them is jarring and explicit, however, the filmmakers obviously did everything that they could to distance the witches from being thought of as women. Physically every witch is monstrous, with scaly skin and pointed teeth, unrecognizable as women for the most part.

So not only do they not look like women, they don’t act like maternal loving women, again making it hard to identify with them and I suppose on some level, making it easier to stomach the horrific amount of beating they all seem to receive. There are dozens of evil female witches running around dragging children from their beds in order to sacrifice them for immortality and literally consume them. 

Famke Janssen as her monstrous self in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

There is one woman though who isn’t the same as the rest of the witches; Famke Janssen (X-Men) is a grand-witch and therefore able to change her appearance. She can appear as a normal human woman or can shift into her more natural, monstrous self. Interestingly enough, at one point of the movie she is, of course, being beaten up by Hansel and to try and stop him from strangling her she shifts into her beautiful human self and begins to beg Hansel for mercy. Hansel knows that she is still evil and that the beauty is just an act and so finishes her off. The moment is almost meta, as if the filmmaker was acknowledging the fact that had the women been human-looking, such gratuitously violent acts against them would have perhaps been unacceptable to audiences.

There are good witches in the film however, maternal loving women who are healers and sacrifice for their children, and are of course, physically beautiful. Though this doesn’t prevent them from getting the shit beat out of them either, just in a more socially acceptable way and one where there is swift retribution from one of the nice males in the film.

One thing that was interesting though, the film is based off the classic fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel in which Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the forest because their evil stepmother doesn’t want to take care of them anymore. However, in this film version, Hansel and Gretel hate their mother (no stepmother) for abandoning them, only to realize later in the film that the only reason she abandoned them was to save them. It was a moment of explanation for a character who’s been demonized as a bad mother for years, but instead of playing into that, the film actually gave her a reason and a cause, humanizing her for once.

For the most part the whole film is a travesty of plot and character and feminism; it’s one redeeming feature being the amazing soundtrack, but I suppose that at the end of the day, the movie is at least honest since it never pretended to be anything other than what it was: a clichéd Hollywood action movie. 

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.