Molly's Game

2017 • 140 minutes

About this movie

MOLLY'S GAME is based on the true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested in the middle of the night by 17 FBI agents wielding automatic weapons. Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknownst to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey, who learned that there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led us to believe.

Ratings and reviews

Oh the eye rolling evoked by this film... I could not help but laugh at the sentencing scene once the judge began to contrast the insignificance of the main character's crime in contrast to the vile perpetrated by Wall Street every day. Sorkin disappointed me. This movie is 2.5 hours because this girl feels the need to blandly describe every detail of every scene in a voice over in order to fill the pages of her book. If you are a woman who enjoys unapologetic pandering, this movie may be for you. Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba do their best with what they have, but the underlying story is simply not very interesting.

Great story, but it could have been told so much better. The part where she first starts taking a rake in her game, and none of the players even act like they notice, is extremely corny and unrealistic. Maybe it was just a symbolic way to say that at one point she started taking a rake, but the way that they portrayed it was totally unrealistic. I would have liked to have seen a little more poker action myself, but maybe that's just me, since the story was less about poker and more about the personal integrety of Molly and the story about how she came to run some of the biggest privite games in the country.

I had to watch it twice to understand fully but got my money's worth. I think this would have been a much better film if not directed by a first-time director Aaron Sorkin. He packed way too much into it.