In spite of the sincere attempt made by the movie gods to have films depicting the collective and individual experiences with an old human festival be grouped in the basket of movies that come like season’s greetings (or season’s warnings), there has always been a bunch of movies that bumped into the room at the wrong time of the year, one that does not quite have much to do with them. But while some of those movies manage to transport you to the chilling cold with their untimely invocation, the other movies wrap themselves in their own unnecessary stab at it. I mention this in relation to the summer release of Kenny Yates’s “Final Wager,” given the Christmas plot and setting of it all.
The story is an interesting bit of information, too, but only on the level of its snappy, comical thriller aesthetic. Fast-talking and overly emotive, Chancey has taken help and is trying to move past his sports gambling addiction, which caught him in a great spiral of obsessive sports-watching some time ago, glimpses of which are the first of the movie that we see. Although pretty much on the right track as of now, he is shocked to know that he now needs to save his mother from being evicted from the nursing home in which she lives.
After a long, pointless bickering with the homeowner, he then comes to an agreement that he would need to save a huge sum of 60,000 dollars in a limited period of time. When everything from asking to requesting gets on the blink, he finally sees the only solution that he would originally come up with – to get back to the betting business. When he realizes in this seemingly unforgiving cold of the holidays that he has never lost a bet on Christmas day, he starts having thoughts that this might just be the miracle that he has been waiting to happen.
On the surface, and even under the layers, this is a plot too feather-light for a movie to still be made in this day and age around it. The concept of a gambling addict going back to his ways of saving himself or someone close to him is an overdone sentimental plot that is wrapped either for thrilling twists, tragic turns, or plain and simple laughs. However, the dilution comes with the advantage of experimenting with tone-deafness with superior filmmaking that treats a protagonist as simplistic as Chancey on a more psychological plane.
However, as a director, Kenny Yates is just not equipped solidly enough to do that. His treatment is oddly melodramatic in places, but that is the only way in which this mostly plastic comedy really feels like it is breathing. Too bad then that the writing finds its mojo in the overly familiar scenes of love and bonding between Chance and his bartender girlfriend. Yates’s editing or Nate Stifler’s soggy cinematography offer visuals that give nearly nothing to write home about except the key question of the plot, which, most inventively, asks whether this is actually a miracle or is this the story of an addict who just can’t let go of his old habits.
To make matters worse, “Final Wager” suffers the most at the hands of its performances. Of course, the writing, with its cheap and saccharine antics here and there, is to be blamed for this inefficiency, but a lot of it can allude to the actors and their own inability to drive home the major bumps of the script. It does not help that Scott Hamm Duenas, playing the titular role of Chance, also delivers the worst performance of the lot, hardly landing the key conflict of the story with any sense of ease.
Truly, Christmas miracles can be a thing. But perhaps they work only when you actually wait until Christmas for them to happen. Perhaps. Because “Final Wager” only invites boredom and lethargy in this heated summer.
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