Dumbed down; the book was much better

Rating: 4/10 (6 January 2018)

It was sad to see how much this movie was dumbed down from the book. There was lots of great material in the book. The main focus should have been on how Molly organized the games and who was involved. However, the director felt that adding Kevin Costner and Idris Elba's characters and the skiing subplot was more important than actually telling the story faithfully. There was so much detail about what went into setting up the games and they totally ignored it and actually invented other things. Like for example, I do not think the drug problem was even in the book, and if it was, it didn't mess her up that badly. It's like the actual games and the celebrities involved were an afterthought. Without the names of the celebrities involved, the story had less of an impact. They were just Hollywood C-List actors and extras. Tobey Maguire also got a total pass, they went light on him in the movie; I can't believe they didn't even include the Shufflemaster debacle and worse yet, the time he demanded she bark like a seal for a tip.
A friend of mine that's big into film raved about the film because other people have, but as someone that read the book, I just thought it was awful. I can't recommend it.