Every now and then, killing time before a screening, some of us Chicago critics will try in vain to plan a sort of group Underdog Movie Marathon/Series. (I was going to say “sleepover,” but those implications are too horrifying to comprehend). The idea is that each critic shows a film they genuinely love—not ironically as “a bad movie,” but honestly enjoy on its own merits—but that everyone else hates.

The concept usually breaks down because we’ve found no matter what woe-begotten, critically-nuked, box-office disaster you proudly haul out as your favorite movie underdog, someone else in the group also likes it, and where’s the fun in that?

I mention this because while the remake of The Gambler from director Rupert Wyatt (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed), starring and produced by Mark Wahlberg, is not getting completely critically stomped, it’s not all that appreciated, either.

Those who like it tend to give it a pass as a “not as bad as you’d expect” genre flick, and it’s been largely ignored at the box office by audiences who can’t get past the “Mark Wahlberg gambling movie” poster. And I mention it because I’m not sure The Gambler is a great, unappreciated gem—it might actually be a somewhat shallow, laughably preposterous and grandiose piece of overly-macho chintz that only I alone truly love.

But I do love this film. A lot. I know I might be loving it for all the wrong reasons; dazzled by its aggressive style; seduced by its torrent of smarty-pants speechifying; and perhaps personally relating to its pompous, narcissistic themes for all the wrong dime-store, bull-crap, pseudo-philosophical reasons. I love The Gambler like a Vegas show, or perhaps more appropriately, a Vegas casino: I willingly give into the illusion of depth and importance and all those flashing lights and amped emotions, even as I know all the fun is probably just covering up a seedy, hollow deception.

Producer Wahlberg put himself in the James Caan “Axel Freed” role from the 1974 version, which was directed by Karel Reisz and written by James Toback as part self-aggrandizing autobiographical ode to Toback’s own gambling addiction and part riff on Dostoyevsky’s semi-autobiographical novella The Gambler.

This time out the character is named Jim Bennett, but he’s still a college lit teacher who romanticizes his gambling as a philosophical-literary exercise in self-determination and is in way too deep of debt to unsavory, violent underworld characters.

However, the remake is not about a man with a self-destructive gambling addiction; it’s about a smart, once-talented, over-privileged, trust-fund asshole who sees self-destruction as the only way out of the trap of his seemingly cushy existence.

That’s not much of a rah-rah theme for the Cineplex, nor do I think some supposedly “intelligent” critics even grasped it—they were too preoccupied with snarking out “Marky Mark as a lit professor” jokes or treating the film as yet another 12-step cautionary tale. It doesn’t help The Gambler’s commercial potential that the main character, Bennett, is a sardonic jerk who’s not too busy destroying himself at the blackjack and roulette tables every night to verbally slash at everyone else around him (especially his students) with his two-sided, razor-sharp self-loathing.

In fact, part of the film’s appeal is how much you want to punch Bennett in the face. I say it every week, but the more we only think of “movies” as escapism (or maybe uplifting education), we’ve become conditioned to want to “like” our film characters. Bennett is not likable, nor is he particularly admirable, no matter how hard he tries to ennoble his drive toward oblivion in lofty speeches about truth and being yourself and wanting more than complacent hypocrisy from your life.

Bennett’s addiction isn’t gambling, it’s self-destruction—a cleansing suicide by Fortuna. He knows he’s not truly a genius, only an intellectual con man hiding behind hyper-Hemingway-ized “whatever” machismo. (Layered on like plate armor, at times Bennett’s self-loathing gets so thick, so humorously sharp-edged that it feels like a separate character in the film.)

He’s wasted what talent he had and can’t stand himself or the privileged economic and social status that won’t let him truly fall. He lives in abject fear of being forever suspended in mediocrity—the very words “life plan” are banal poison to him.

In both the ’74 and ’14 films, the main character hits up his mother to bail him out of his debts. In the original, mother is an earnest, caring doctor played by Jacqueline Brookes. In the remake, she’s Jessica Lange in full decadent-wealth mode, sliding from tennis courts to bank branch offices with the imperial, serpentine malice of a survivor. But the bigger difference is how Bennett loses his mother’s bail-out money: In the original, Caan’s Axel uses it to carefully place bets he’s sure will pay off, climaxing with him hitting a 3 on an 18 at a glamorous Vegas blackjack table—a stunning miracle of hot luck he crows as a cosmic coronation.

This time around, Wahlberg’s Bennett sets out to deliberately blow every last bit of Mom’s cash at a seedy desert casino, dumping it off 10 grand at a time amidst overweight dead-enders with their oxygen tanks strapped to their motorized chairs. Unlike Axel, Bennett feels no guilt over taking his mother’s money—just the opposite, he wants nothing more than to burn the loan and permanently remove her from his life.

Bennett’s obsessive gambling—or more specifically his reckless shell-game running up of debts and then more debts to pay off those debts—is the only way he sees out of traps like his mother’s money or even his own lazy talent. As fun and cool and sexy-seedy as the trip is, The Gambler is driving toward a singular point: Bennett’s careful maneuvering of himself into a corner neither his family’s money nor his over-educated bellicose charisma can get him out of.

The entire plot of The Gambler is Bennett working very hard to get to the point where, with all his vicious creditors watching, his existence comes down to a single spin of the roulette wheel. In what he sees as the purest method available, he lets the universe decide his worth and his fate, daring it to snuff him out or free him. So is it really gambling if you want to lose?

If all this sounds oppressively, depressingly heavy, it’s not at all. Director Wyatt is mostly along for Wahlberg and Monahan’s ride, but he has a clean, confident visual style that sometimes sports the shiny, chrome-thin decadence of false ‘80s Playboy fantasies, but stops just short of too-showy. Dancing around visual and thematic influences from films like O Lucky man, Naked, Leaving Las Vegas, and Drive, the exposition-free Gambler plays fast and smart, never slowing down to wait for the viewer as it rides a torrent of Monahan’s words; a brilliant supporting cast of character actors; and Wahlberg’s riotous smug petulance.

The Gambler is not a perfect film–it’s never as light or nimble enough to carry all those existential speeches effortlessly, nor is it always cohesive in pace, performance, or purpose. But it’s often hilarious, even self-satirizing in a dark, mean way. (There’s a wickedly funny scene with Richard Schiff in a jewelry store.) Wyatt’s sleek, Brit-pop visions of “secret” LA aside, the film belongs to Monahan’s never-ending rush of words. Each new declarative speech—spit out with easy intensity by Bennett or one of his antagonists—viciously, thematically cannibalizes the one before.

Some of those lacerating soliloquies are ranted by Bennett in his lecture hall as he muses with increasingly energetic venom about Shakespeare and Camus to disinterested students for whom he mostly musters only bored disdain.

Put aside your preconceptions about Wahlberg and you’ll find that while this may not be a great performance, it’s a fantastically entertaining one—a pale, stone-faced vampire-ape in skinny, cool, dark suits and scowling under unruly hair and perfect sunglasses, Bennett’s smarter-than-thou smirk and self-indulgent boy grin weaves beautifully in and out of hammy defiance and childish narcissism.

But the film’s best scenes of verbal daring-do are when Bennett gets his once-rich, white ass chewed up by the film’s supporting cast, especially John Goodman and Michael K. Williams, both of whom have a ball kicking the callow pretty-boy around. As Frank, a high-end loan shark who’s part leg-breaker and part Bad Buddha consciousness expander, Goodman gets the best bits—all bald head and bare-chested bulk, he’s a joy to watch as he dispenses world-weary life wisdom alongside casual, resigned threats of apocalyptic violence.

But Williams’s Neville also expertly subverts The Wire and Boardwalk Empire actor’s usual criminal-menace typecasting: his “non-standard lender” character looks at Bennett with annoyed awe, unsure whether to marvel at the magnificent bravado of Bennett’s stupidity or have the idiot killed. (“Is this some existential situations and shit?” asks Neville with a charmingly dismissive chuckle.)

(Only Brie Larson’s character—the standard wise, alluring ingénue on hand to act as a potential life preserver for the drowning man—gets left out of all the fun. Larson [Short Term 12] is a fantastic actress, but her typical sexist sidelining thanks to Monahan’s throwback He-Man posturing is the biggest strike against the film.)

The Gambler sometimes teeters on the verge of cartoonish grotesquery, but still, those words… all those wonderful, arch, posturing words. Like David Milch’s Deadwood scripts, there are times Monahan’s screenplay seems so in love with its faux-Shakespearean, pseudo-intellectual self that it feels like a ‘70s drum or guitar solo—its monologues are at first technically impressive, then run toward silly before pushing past into something like transcendence through ridiculous excess.

I’m still not sure all those strengths and weaknesses add up to anything genuinely good, or if under all the film’s lofty yapping and “deep thoughts” table gazing, it’s really just a sleazy bag of tarted-up cheap thrills—a bad undergrad paper with a sexy cover page and too much reliance on the thesaurus. But I’m a self-admitted word slut, and even though it may be my own form of self-indulgence, I do love watching The Gambler—or at least listening to it strut by.