The Odds
It's like a grown-up movie, but, you know, for kids!
SCREENINGS:
Monday, September 12, 8:45 p.m.
AMC 10 (10 Dundas Street East)
Wednesday, September 14, 5:30 p.m.
AMC 6 (10 Dundas Street East)
Saturday, September 17, 3 p.m.
AMC 10 (10 Dundas Street East)
There’s a smug, shit-eating quality to The Odds star Tyler Johnston’s grinning mug that makes seeing his character, grade-twelve bookie and cool guy Desson, get smacked around in the film’s third act seem much more satisfying. On paper, this film seems like Rounder Babies, a movie about teenagers grinding in wood-panelled basement poker rooms. In effect, it’s not much more, but there’s a gloss and efficiency that elevates the material somewhat.
Dess is a smirking high school big wheel until his best buddy, Barry (Calum Worthy), commits suicide. He suspects foul play and starts following the money to bigger and seedier underground gambling rooms. He brings plucky bad girl Colleen (Julia Maxwell) along with him, reverse-engineering the standard femme fatale dynamic. The Odds never really seems as gritty and dark as Davidson wants it to seem (these are just kids after all), but when it begins flirting with the real consequences of gambling and organized crime–lite, the parental panic premise becomes slightly less laughable. And the high-school-wrestling-jock-as-movie-mini-boss thing actually works really well.