Now, he’s playing a smart guy in a smart movie - and he does it with grace, ease, and credibility, while still shading the character with the kind of street-savvy recklessness that we’re used to seeing him play.Īnd that recklessness is established right from the jump, delving into his world of underground games in back rooms, warehouses, and off-the-grid homes director Wyatt loves the way these rooms look and feel, the sounds of chips sliding across felt and marble rolling around the wheel.
He sports a distinctive dialect that’s too often associated with dumb guys (which often says more about the classism of those making the assumption than anything else), and had the misfortune of playing smart characters in indisputably stupid movies. He’s kind of a dumb guy, goes the presumption, so how are we supposed to buy him as a smart character?īut the trouble is, he’s not a dumb guy. The point is, Wahlberg’s persona isn’t exactly synonymous with hyper-intellectualism - which forms the basis of the very funny parodies of that image crafted by Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live or Daniel Van Kirk on Doug Loves Movies. Perhaps we consider him the real-life embodiment of the dopes on Entourage, which he produced. Those who don’t remember those days, or have chosen to let Wahlberg move past them, tend to think of him in terms of the characters he’s played, Southie-bred tough guys ( The Departed, The Fighter), dim bulbs ( Boogie Nights, Pain & Gain), or parodies of either ( Ted, The Other Guys). Twenty years may have passed, but many of us still think of him as Funky Bunch figurehead Marky Mark, or the face (and body) of Calvin Klein underwear, or (thanks to his own questionable efforts to clear up his record) a real-life thug. They’re the snickers that say, yeah, sorry, we don’t think “intellectual” when we think of Mark Wahlberg. Those are the same snickers that we all shared when Wahlberg played a high school science teacher in The Happening, or a brilliant inventor in Transformers: Age of Extinction. On the other, it’s a metaphor for what Mark Wahlberg is doing as an actor with The Gambler, a film where he plays - get ready - an English literature professor. On one hand, that’s entirely in character, all of a piece with the self-destructive instincts of his character, an ultra-privileged nihilist with a serious gambling problem. This isn’t unusual in the back half of the picture, during which Wahlberg sports a steadily pulpier mug, but he does something interesting in the midst of the trouncing: he leans into it. There is a scene, late in Rupert Wyatt’s new remake of The Gambler, where Mark Wahlberg is getting a serious beating.
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