Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
Okay, so I actually watched this a few days before the Houston Curtis interview. Had meant to watch it for a long time, but his obviously pushed me to do so. Plus it's on Netflix.
Anyway, meant to post a review, but forgot until now.
I agree with Chinamaniac. The movie was about 35 minutes too long. It had a runtime of 2:20, and that was unnecessary. There were a lot of pointless scenes, especially at the beginning, which could have been cut. The whole skiing thing early in the film dragged on forever and wasn't particularly interesting. It would have sufficed to show a brief scene of the race, her injury, and some commentary as to why that was so impactful.
The family scenes in general weren't very well done until the one near the end with her father.
I know Sorkin was patting himself on the back for what he thought was brilliant dialogue between Molly and her lawyer (and later, the speech the lawyer gave to the feds), but I found a lot of this dragged, as well. In fact, while the movie thought it was establishing great chemistry between the characters of Molly and her lawyer, I felt the opposite. I didn't think the two actors had any chemistry, and the Molly/lawyer scenes ultimately didn't amount to much. At the end, she went against his advice, and it was a sympathetic judge who saved her. I think they were going for an Erin Brockovich vibe here with the lawyer stuff, but it just didn't land.
The poker games themselves and the characters in them were the most interesting part to me.
The Molly character herself was kind of off-putting to me. She was cold, asexual, self-righteous, and of course somehow loyal to a fault. I didn't see much humanity in the character until near the end with her dad. Even Jessica Chastain's delivery seemed stilted, which I'm not sure was intentional.
The scene where she berated Tobey for staking Houston and having him in the same game was laughable. People have had pieces of each other in high stakes cash games for decades. Molly was acting like that was a cardinal sin that she just couldn't get past. Ugh.
Anyway, the movie wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as I expected. It should have been about 105 minutes instead of 140. Had they edited out the skiing crap, tightened up the family scenes, and mostly written out the lawyer stuff, the movie would have been considerably better.
Why didn't the viewer find out what happened to that mafioso who beat her up in her apartment? Was he arrested in that sweep? What was his name? Did he get sentenced? We never got an answer.