Molly's Game: Aaron Sorkin's Disappointing Directorial Debut

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There are few unique experiences remaining in the movies. 

Quentin Tarantino's hyper-verbal, hyper-violent spectacles. David Fincher's forays into the darkness. Martin Scorsese's high-energy explorations of complicated, controversial characters. Wes Anderson's quirky atmospheres and aesthetics. 

And Aaron Sorkin's quick-witted, relentless, rapid-fire screenplays usually fall into the same category. But this time, in his directorial debut, the back-and-forth banter leads nowhere. Molly's Game starts strong, but we quickly realize that Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) isn't very interesting, and she and Sorkin don't have much of a story to tell. 

I purposely avoided the details of Bloom's book, Molly's Game: High Stakes, Hollywood's Elite, Hotshot Bankers, My Life in the World of Underground Poker, because I wanted to go into the movie fresh. I wanted to learn about Bloom's "interesting" life -- interesting enough to be turned into a film handled by a Hollywood power player -- running one of the highest-stakes cash games in America. I knew the bare minimum -- what everybody else probably knew from the initial news reports -- that Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire and Alex Rodriguez had played in her game. That was more than enough to fan my flame of intrigue. 

And the film satisfied my curiosity out of the gate. ** SPOILERS from here on out. ** I had absolutely no idea that Molly was an Olympic-hopeful skier. Sorkin starts with a spark, and we get an entertaining anecdote from Molly's athletic career. It's fast-paced, different, and it catches your attention. 

So, for the first half-hour to forty-five minutes, I waited for similar revelations from Molly's "noteworthy" life. I thought maybe the story of how she started the poker game would be interesting. Instead, we find out that it wasn't even her game. She was asked to start handling the logistics by her jerk of a boss, low-level producer Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong, playing an asshole, kind of like he was in The Big Short), and when he got sick of paying her, she was essentially forced to make arrangements to keep the game going on her own. She liked the thousands of dollars in tips, so she quickly pivoted to a more welcoming, upscale locale. 

And then, the movie is essentially about how she keeps the game going in different ways and places. Sorkin's pitter-patter dialogue is above average (as per usual), but it doesn't rival his world-class work in The Social Network, Moneyball or Steve Jobs. For a movie largely about high-stakes poker, the stakes of the actual story seem extremely low. She runs a game; some guys win, some guys lose and Michael Cera spoofs Tobey Maguire. Cera and Idris Elba (playing Charlie Jaffey, Esq.) received significant amounts of praise in the reviews I read, but while both were perfectly fine, I saw nothing to write home about.

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Sorkin's characters in Molly's Game don't jump off the screen and stick like Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson), Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender), Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the Winklevi (Armie Hammer), Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) or Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). 

The supporting players of Molly's Game seem like seasons, fleeting, just holding a place until the change in temperature. If you walk out of Molly's Game thinking you'll have characters to talk about for years, then please write to me. Eduardo Saverin made Garfield's career. Parker turned Justin Timberlake-the-actor into a thing. Jessep made everyone realize that they can't handle the truth. For decades. 

There's simply no weight to this one. It's an empty story, carried by a mostly empty protagonist -- or perhaps antihero would be the more appropriate term? 

And, not surprisingly, since it's his directorial debut, Sorkin held on to too much of his material. For a thin story, this movie runs way too long. There's a reasonable argument to be made that I would have really enjoyed the movie if it was an hour and 25 minutes instead of two hours and twenty minutes. Molly's Game isn't an epic. It isn't a magnum opus. It's a one-trick pony about an annoying girl who ran poker games. 

It had some entertaining individual scenes, but you definitely don't need to go to the movie theater for this one. Wait for HBO. 

** JOHNNY FRO'S RATING: 6 out of 10 **

LNB's Updated Rankings:

1. Up in the Air (9.5/10) Archived here
2. Steve Jobs (9.5/10)
3. Stay (9/10) Archived here
4. Gone Girl (9/10) Archived here
5. Tape (9/10) Archived here

6. A Perfect Murder (9/10)

7. Split (8.5/10)

8. Bad Moms (8.5/10)

9. Basquiat (8.5/10)

10. Moonlight (8/10)

11. The Revenant (8/10)

12. The Shallows (7.5/10)
13. Focus (7.5/10) Archived here

14. The Night Before (7.5/10)

15. 10 Cloverfield Lane (7/10)

16. The Walk (7/10)
17. Molly's Game (6/10)

18. Joy (5.5/10)

19. La La Land (5/10)
20. The Program (3/10)

21. Rings (1.5/10)
22. Mother's Day (1.5/10)

Reviews to Come...

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Sunshine Cleaning

Zero Dark Thirty
Why Him?
Shut In
Body of Lies

Untraceable

The Wonder Boys

Jackie Brown

Mean Streets

Nerve

The Hateful Eight

The Seven Five

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

How to Be Single

Deadpool

Ratatouille

The Spectacular Now
The Visit
Loving
In Bruges
Nocturnal Animals
War Dogs
The Boy
The Purge: Election Year
And more...