BRAD FURMAN

Bil’s rating (out of 5):  BB. 

USA, 2013.  Regency Enterprises, New Regency Pictures, Appian Way, Double Feature Films.  Screenplay by Brian Koppelman, David Levien.  Cinematography by Mauro Fiore.  Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian Koppelman, David Levien, Arnon Milchan, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher.  Music by Christophe Beck.  Production Design by Charisse Cardenas.  Costume Design by Sophie De Rakoff, Carlos Rosario.  Film Editing by Jeff McEvoy.  

Sort of a Social Network for the intellectually dim, this mildly amusing B-movie stars Justin Timberlake as a Princeton masters student who tries to meet his enormous tuition requirements by directing fellow students to online gambling websites.  After trying to win his own tuition money by throwing all savings down on one site, he finds errors in the patterns in the game and decides that the site is corrupted.  Thinking this is something that the exiled tycoon who owns the site (Ben Affleck) should know, Timberlake flies to Costa Rica and works his way into the big man’s company, informing him that he’s got a crooked table on his website and immediately getting himself a job as Affleck’s right hand man.  The thing is, we’ve already seen Affleck arranging for gross old men to get dirty massages from gorgeous prostitutes, so it’s quite likely that he is not the clean heroic boss that our young man thinks he is.  It’s an efficient, enjoyable little adventure, complete with the shady femme fatale (Gemma Arterton), but buying either Timberlake as naïve or Affleck as imposing (he gives a truly anodyne performance) is too much to bear and the result is easy to leave behind.