When To Risk It All Or Lose It All?

Ever been confronted with challenging situations when life seemed at its hardest? It’s as if the forces of destiny all of a sudden decided to conspire against you and conceive a diabolical plot that will suit your life and your particular situation to a T.

Ever felt that way? I know I have. I have friends who have testified to feeling and experiencing the same thing, too.

I remember Rocco, a mate of mine, going through a particularly tough time one year. Financially he was really struggling. He was sort of between jobs, well actually he was busy studying, part-time. In-between, he used to work half days at an auto-electrician’s workshop, four days of the week and in the evening he delivered pizzas; with his scooter. Rocco didn’t have a car.  

As it turns out, between working at the auto-shop and delivering pizzas, Rocco got to know, let’s just say, some unsavoury characters and before you know it he was making deliveries to people who wanted more than just your regular pepperoni-pizza.

By that, I mean any recreational substance conceivable to your mind (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you’ll have an idea).

From being a simple pizza delivery guy, all of a sudden, he was an enormously prolific conveyor of stimulants. He had his clientele, he had his connections, he had the merchandise and he had his scooter, which by the way, was the perfect vehicle for running his own narcotics courier service. Everything just seemed to click, enabling him to make the most of this ‘opportunity’ during his time of need. Until of course, Rocco was caught.

Suddenly, fate took a turn for the worse. He was lucky to end up receiving only a suspended jail sentence (some of his connections were good for more than just purchasing illegal substances), but the whole ordeal did exactly what it had to – it gave him a proper wake-up call. Rocco retired from the dope-pedalling business and upped the focus on his part-time studies substantially.

When I asked him one day what in the world he was thinking, he told me, ‘I was thinking there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to pay for my studies and support myself with what I was earning from pizzas. The money I made for delivering drugs to these people was easy, it was cash-in-hand – lots of it, too and I was too desperate to care.’  

I have to admit, I’ve never been THAT desperate, but Richie Furst has.

In ‘Runner Runner’, Justin Timberlake plays his character. Richie is a guy who had to leave his life as a stockbroker on Wall Street behind after the company he worked for went down as a result of the stock market crash.

With few options left, he’s forced to resume his graduate studies at Princeton and finish his masters degree in finance. Unfortunately, due to his previous high-paying career, the board at Princeton refuses him any financial assistance and he has to make a plan.

Richie starts a small enterprise on the side where he introduces fellow students to online gambling and then takes a percentage for each new player he brings to the table.

Everything is going perfect until one of the students maxes out his father’s credit card limit during a poker match and word gets round to the Dean at Princeton of Richie’s virtual casino business.

Try as he might, the Dean won’t hear him out when he tries to explain that what he is doing is nothing more than marketing for these gambling sites and that he has no alternative way of financing his degree. He is told in no uncertain terms that either he stops what he is busy doing or ‘You won’t have a degree to finance here anymore’.

Being a phenomenal poker player himself, in a final bid to make as much money as possible, he decides to gamble all his savings, but ends up losing it. When he suspects foul play by the owners of the gambling site he played on, he decides to fly down to Costa Rica to go and confront the owner. 

But getting close to Ivan Block (Ben Affleck) doesn’t just happen.  He’s too much of a mogul. Coming up against a man who has a made a living out of satisfying people’s senses also catches Richie off-guard and it doesn’t take much convincing from Ivan to lure him over into his fast paced world of money, women and power.

Soon, the FBI is involved and yet again Richie is forced to gamble everything he has or risk losing it all.

Justin Timberlake gives a believable performance to his character, so does Affleck. The story itself seems to be fast tracked at stages and makes the film lose credibility. It’s entertaining to watch nonetheless.