Statham stars as Nick Wild, and the name change (Reynolds played Nick “Mex” Escalante, but Statham would’ve been even less convincing) is one of just a small handful of deviations from the original script. Nick is a Vegas tough guy who insists on being called a “chaperone” when really he’s muscle. He knows everybody in town, from the blackjack dealers to the maids to the mob bosses, and everybody admires and/or respects him as a straight shooter. When a young stranger comes looking to hire him, Nick at first brushes him off before launching into a soliloquy that begins, “I’ve been knocked down, blown up, lied to, shit on, and shot at, so nothing much surprises me anymore.”
When Nick’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-stone friend (Dominik García-Lorido) is brutally beaten by a cartoonish gangster played by Milo Ventimiglia, he at first refuses to help her get revenge: He’s smart enough to know when to walk away. But a little guilt trip nudges him toward slow-motion violence, which is when we learn that Nick Wild is some kind of unstoppable ass-kicker with a secret history and that he eschews firearms in favor of whatever’s handy, including sharpened credit cards, a medallion, and an ashtray. Nick and the hooker grab the gangster’s cash and split, planning to head their separate ways out of town.
Where a more modern action movie might springboard from there into a predictable cat-and-mouse game, Wild Card builds an uneasy alliance between a ’70s-indebted flawed-detective story and silly ’80s action. It attempts some character depth via Nick’s gambling problem—Statham says that he wants to leave Vegas for good at least a dozen times—but then loses that goodwill with a tonally bizarre performance from that young stranger who appeared at the beginning: It’s as if puppy dog Michael Angarano was flown in from a different movie, or maybe an afterschool special, to teach and be taught life lessons. By the time the last blood is spilled, Wild Card is almost irredeemably silly, a fun but forgettable macho fantasy that will surely age as poorly as its source material has—only quicker.
