Molly's Game

There's a reason that 'slow' is a synonym for 'stupid." However, 'quick' or 'fast' does not necessarily equate to 'smart' or 'clever.' When you make a movie where the chief angle of the storytelling lies in saying a lot of stuff fast and running a number of visuals by the audience in something near a blur, in order to imply how clever you are, you'd really better have a lot of actual clever behind it, or otherwise the whole thing just comes across as someone trying to convince you of how clever he is, even if he's not. This here's a case in point: there are flashes of the cleverness throughout this movie, but not enough to make you really believe in the intelligence of the script or the writer/director. It would also help if protagonist Molly Bloom really was a sympathetic character, rather than a 'maybe she is, maybe she isn't' heroine of the piece. This film's highest virtue is you get healthy doses of Jessica Chastain, which is never bad, but in this case isn't necessarily enough to lift this work any higher than average. All in all, everyone played this hand into something decent, maybe three of a kind--but a royal flush it isn't.