Critics are advising audiences to sprint in the opposite direction from “Runner Runner.”
The new thriller earned a dreck-worthy 9 percent “rotten” rating on the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. To put that in perspective, recent notorious turkeys “The Lone Ranger” and “R.I.P.D.” received “rotten” scores of 31 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
It’s a huge step back for Ben Affleck after scoring a Best Picture Oscar for “Argo,” with many reviewers lamenting that the film was reminiscent of the kind of paycheck roles (2003’s “Paycheck,” for one) that got the actor into so much trouble in the mid-aughts.
“Runner Runner” opened Friday, with Justin Timberlake in the lead role as a Princeton college student who gets sucked into the world of online gambling.