What a weird world we live in, that the director of Rise of the Planet of the Apes chose as his next project a Mark Wahlberg-starring remake of a 40-year-old James Caan movie scripted by James Toback. But here we are, and here The Gambler is, and let’s just make the best of it, shall we? Wahlberg stars as Jim Bennett, a self-loathing college professor with a serious gambling problem. In the movie’s first 20 minutes, he wins a few hands of blackjack, loses a few more hands, and somehow winds up in serious debt to two different bookies. Bennett comes from a wealthy family—he wears Armani suits in pretty much every scene--but his grandmother (Jessica Lange, a little hammy) refuses to bail him out this time.

You can tell from his obsession with literary suicides that Bennett is self-destructive; The Gambler thankfully spends very little time worrying about the whys and hows of his psychology. Instead, it invites us to gape at this unrepentantly unlikable main character as he fucks up over and over again.

For its first half, The Gambler is a gem, but a rough gem. Rupert Wyatt’s direction is confident and sleek. The soundtrack is a lively, if slightly cheesy, mixtape of folk and soul tracks. Performances from a sinister John Goodman and an amiably threatening Michael K. Williams perk up the film at just the right moments. Even Wahlberg handles the gambling scenes with a surprising depth. One minute, he’s the coolest man in the room, and the next, he’s the biggest loser on the planet. But the scenes where we’re supposed to believe Wahlberg as a professor of literature are a bridge too far. Sometimes it sounds like he had to memorize the professorial lines syllable by syllable, as though they were written in a foreign language. (While Caan in the original Gambler expounded on Dostoevsky, Wahlberg makes a few oblique references to Shakespeare and Camus.) Poor Brie Larsen has nothing to do as Bennett’s star student, a lead female role that’s just about as poorly written as any I’ve seen this year.

Wyatt’s Gambler doesn’t have the sleazy-cool 1970s vibe of the original, but it holds its own for a while with a surprising sense of humor. Unfortunately, the end of the remake betrays Toback’s semi-autobiographical script, opting instead for a steaming trash heap of cliche and sentimentality. If you’re looking for an overambitious film about the strange allure of self-destruction, you’d be better off sticking with the (admittedly uneven) original Gambler.