Wild Card

There's a melancholy Elmore Leonard vibe to this sun-bleached neon-noir, which finds British hardman Jason Statham in a more reflective mode than usual. Sadly, Statham - like director Simon West, who gave us the rabble-rousing Con Air - is better suited to kick-ass action, which punctuates Wild Card much less frequently than it perhaps ought to. Statham plays Nick Wild, a Vegas minder with a mysterious past who is solicited by a sometime girlfriend (Sofia Vergara) to get revenge on the Mafia hoods who beat and raped her. Meanwhile, in a bizarre subplot completely at odds with the main storyline, Wild agrees to work for the nerdy Cyrus (Michael Angarano), who requests his services as a bodyguard for a night of gambling on the Strip. The fight scenes are deadpan and electric, as they should be in a Statham film, but the attempts at comedy and pathos are sorely misjudged in a loose-knit storyline that simply ambles to an underwhelming conclusion.