Runner Runner **

This empty-headed gambling thriller stars Justin Timberlake as Richie Furst, a student at Princeton funding his master’s degree  by promoting an online gambling site to students. However, after losing all his money playing online poker, Richie attempts to track down Ivan Block(Ben Affleck) who owns the lucrative gambling  empire  in Costa Rica, but Furst is quickly becomes seduced into Block’s decadent lifestyle. It aspires to be Wall Street except its ‘money corrupts’ subject matter is so vague and limp that all it ends up saying is that online gambling is ‘really contemporary’ .  Furthermore it seems to be a rip off of the similarly dumb, but far more entertaining film  21, which starred Jim Sturgess as a College student trying to pay off his tuition by counting cards in casinos. Whereas that film had Kevin Spacey as the slimy antihero, Runner Runner gives us a soggy Ben Affleck performance and an utterly ludicrous - but sometimes watchable - generic thriller narrative.