“Had the last bit of Molly’s Game been altered to fit in better, it would have been a phenomenal film.”

I recently watched Molly’s Game and despite the praise I had heard about it, I found it to be good and bad. For those who don’t know, Molly’s Game is based on a true story about Molly Bloom, a woman who orchestrated an underground poker game for the world’s most rich and famous people. This plan goes sideways when she is eventually raided by the FBI and summoned to court having been sued by the government. The movie takes a non-linear storytelling approach to break down this epic of a tale, and really takes its time to explain to you what happened.

So let’s start with what I liked about Molly’s Game. I don’t usually like comparing a movie to another movie, but the best way for me to describe the vibe of Molly’s Game would be to compare it to something like The Big Short or American Made. In these movies real life events are broken down into a sort of ‘info-tainment’ structure that not only gives the audience the story, but does so in a way that is fun for them. Molly’s Game does the same with its voiceovers, graphics, and flashbacks that make sure you are on the same page as the movie. This provided a lot more of a fun moviegoing experience becasue these quips and moments of levity really lightened the mood, so instead of the movie being all doom and gloom I was able to walk out of the theatre with a positive experience in my mind. That is until the end of the film. There is a turning point in Molly’s Game wherein the movie stops being about a fun poker game, and instead becomes about Molly’s interactions with various seedy people who may or may not be connected to the mob. This is where the movie took a very drastic decline in my eyes. Now instead of having fun, the movie was all doom and gloom. The pacing of the film, which before was light and fast, slowed to a practical halt and stayed there until the credits started to roll. And this all culminated into what I would call an anticlimactic ending. Now that’s not to say that there weren’t good parts about the ending portion of Molly’s Game, because I would say that my favourite part of the movie takes place during this segment. And the doom and gloom also added to some of the more emotional moments that come to fruition during this part of the film as well. And of course the performances and direction, which were great since the beginning, stay great; so not everything is bad. It’s just the pacing and the tone that threw me off, becasue it gave the film a very clear line of division; almost as if two separate movies were stitched together.

Overall Molly’s Game was an enjoyable movie, but not one that I’ll rewatch for a while. The performances were great and the direction and story were superb, but the ending of the movie really feels out of place with the rest of it. Had the last bit of Molly’s Game been altered to fit in better, it would have been a phenomenal film.

I give Molly’s Game a B