This uber-cool thriller, with Mark Wahlberg playing an existential gambler, is a as improbable as it is enjoyable – slammed full of smart dialogue, slick direction, a great cast, and excellent music choices. The story has a complex heritage: the screenplay from Academy Award-winning writer William Monahan (The Departed) is based on the film of the same name made in 1974 (starring James Caan), and there's more than a nod to Dostoyevskys' 1867 novel The Gambler, set in the giddy resort town of Roulettenberg.

But here we're in contemporary Los Angeles, where Wahlberg plays James Bennett, a man who apparently has it all: wealth and brains, a promising career as a writer, and a associate professorship teaching English at university. But it's just not enough. Bennett not only wants more, but – as he reveals to his best student Amy (Brie Larson) with a reference to Hamlet's monologue about the beauty of the human race, he wants it all. His solution is to gamble, but given his insatiable recklessness he just gets further and further in debt.

First he racks up losses at an underground casino run by Mr Lee (Alvin Ing), then borrows from nasty loan shark Neville Baraka (Michael K. Williams) so he can gamble his way back to black. When that doesn't work and with Bennett on a one-way journey to oblivion, he visits last resort money lender Frank (John Goodman) and squeezes some cash from his long-suffering and elegant wealthy mother (Jessica Lange). With the clock ticking, and three ruthless men on his tail, Bennett develops a plan to repay everyone and start his life over again.

Monahan's screenplay is a superb fresh mix of cerebral banter, high-stakes tension and punchy humour, the literary references to being and not being adding plenty of playful depth. John Gooding delivers some of the best gangster philosophy seen on screen when he tries to talk Bennett out of his self-destructive ways, and Larson is excellent as the quiet crush.

Rupert Wyatt's intelligent and confident directing pays serious homage to Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives) but he holds back on the violence to make this a thoughtful tale with a driving pace. And with everyone around him turning in excellent performances it matters little that Wahlberg is – well, just Walhberg - a good looking actor in an Armani suit playing the cool leading man.