“This is the height of my career,” says Jason Statham sarcastically in his latest potboiler — which turns out to be only marginally better than the previous film that Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (“All the President’s Men’’) adapted from his novel “Heat.”
As Burt Reynolds did in that absymal 1986 flop, titled “Heat,” Statham plays a boozy, down-on-his-luck Las Vegas bodyguard looking for a ticket out of Sin City.
A better cast this time around — Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Sofía Vergara and Max Casella, with cameos by Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis — tries to breathe life into Goldman’s cliché-ridden plot.
Statham and director Simon West somewhat more successfully raise the low stakes with the action sequences in “Wild Card,” especially a massive casino brawl while the Drifters’ “White Christmas’’ plays on the soundtrack.