What happens when you mix "Wall Street" and "Casino"? Something that a devoted movie fan must see!

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2018)

After a decades-long, successful writing career both on TV and for movies, it's kind of surprising that "Molly's Game" is Aaron Sorkin's first project as a director.
He has adapted a true-story-based book about a woman (Jessica Chastain) organizing high-stakes poker nights for the famous and wealthy into a delicious thriller which is a pure movie lover's entertainment, just as he surely planned it.
If you have seen any of the movies Sorkin has (co-)written previously - such as "A Few Good Men", "The Social Network", "Moneyball", or "Steve Jobs" - you can bet your sweet bottom that his directing debut follows the same route, and tries to be even more awesome.
Which is to say that you're gonna experience a high-profile, star-studded project, which is long, tense drama full of great performances and machine-gun-paced dialogue.
Think of "Steve Jobs" (the version starring Michael Fassbender, of course), add another 20 minutes to it, and you get the idea.
The need to deliver loads of fast dialogue as fast as possible will surely put to the test even the very best of the actors, but of course Sorkin has picked an able cast as expected.
The biggest pressure is put on Chastain's lovely shoulders, playing the titular character who has the most lines and also fills the voice-over duties.
She has already proven herself as one of the top actresses working in movies today, and does a great job here too. There are couple of moments when her delivery falters a bit and shows signs of fatigue. But these are minor flaws in otherwise gripping and powerful performance.
And it's all the more impressive if you know that Chastain and Elba had only 10 days to shoot together, and shot 45 pages in the first six days.
As mentioned, the supporting cast is strong and varied too, starting from always-super Idris Elba who is the main screen partner to Chastain, and including Kevin Costner, Jeremy Strong, Michael Cera, Chris O'Dowd, Brian d'Arcy James et al.
The biggest problems with "Molly's Game" might be Sorkin's insistence to feed us the same kind of fast, high-octane content for the whole 140 minutes - which may prove tiring for many, and that the story is just another version of "greed is good" / "rags to riches" blueprint introduced by Oliver Stone's classic "Wall Street".
Luckily, neither of them breaks the movie. Sorkin is actually very effective at playing with the tempo, to give us moments to breathe from the constant acting and dialogue "fireworks" - he didn't manage it as effectively in "Steve Jobs".
The second point - why still copy "Wall Street", a movie which has been countlessly copied for 30 years now - is down to my personal exhaustion from seeing this formula, I guess.
It doesn't make anything significantly worse, really. It's just that every movie using said bluepint seems to concentrate on events and leaving the character building to play the second fiddle.
We never get to follow a well-rounded, satisfying journey of the character's development from point A to B and C, how s/he is depends mostly on the current events.
It would feel like a lesser deficiency for 90 minute movie, perhaps, but these types of movies are usually long, 140 minutes in this case. What about Molly's personal life, for instance?
I am not saying preferring story-driven to character-driven necessarily ruins the experience. I am just saying that maybe there's a time to modify and update the blueprint a little, for a more demanding audiences used to higher quality storytelling dominatnig TV and streaming series. Sorkin should be able to do that, considering his background.
Usually, I feel hesitant to give a movie more than 7/10 for this approach, just because I've seen too much of this kind of thing to feel really excited about it.
But "Molly's Game" deserves more, if only for how it also plays like a good Scorsese style mafia movie. Which would be "Casino", of course, for Molly always lurking in the shadows and watching the poker from afar. For all the determination and power hunger, she really is a fascinating character.
"Molly" doesn't seem to be an award juries' darling, gathering mostly nominations so far and losing both Golden Globe noms to "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". There may not be big Oscar chances, is what I'm saying.
But it is still a very entertaining and attractive variant of "greed is good" type movies. I was hooked from the first minute, just like reading a good Stephen King novel.