‘Uncut Gems’ Would Get A Very Different Reception If Released Today

Uncut Gems came out in December of 2019. The Safdie brothers wrote their first draft in 2009. They filmed it in the fall of 2018, right after PASPA fell. It’s set in 2012.

I’m telling you those four dates because they might matter.

Uncut Gems — there will be spoilers — is the story of Howard Ratner, as played by Adam Sandler. He’s a diamond district jeweler in Manhattan who is, without question, a compulsive gambler. We’re not talking “he bets too much on the Jets.” We’re talking clinical-grade, textbook-definition, somebody call Keith Whyte, problem gambler. The Safdies make this clear approximately 47 seconds into the movie, and they keep making it clear, over and over again.

The most damning evidence: Howard places bets on the opening tip-off of a basketball game. If you bet on the tip, as Anthony Schneck wrote in Thrillist, it “signifies gambling addiction in the same way that having a baby signifies you were pregnant.” Not to mention Howard doesn’t stop betting despite getting dangled out a window by a couple of heavies. Plus he has a girlfriend on the side, a wife who’s leaving him, a loan shark brother-in-law basically running a collections agency at the family Passover seder, and he’s convinced that the next bet he makes will get him out of all his troubles.

He is, in other words, a funhouse mirror version of me and half my friends. Middle-aged Jewish guys who like the action. I was rooting for Howard Ratner the whole movie. I wanted him to walk away with the money.

He doesn’t walk away. He wins a big parlay, and then he gets shot in the face. 

Critics loved it. In 2019, it cleaned up. Ninety-one percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Sandler won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. Won the National Board of Review Best Actor. National Society of Film Critics Best Actor. Golden Globes nomination. Critics’ Choice nomination. There was actual outrage when the Oscars snubbed him.

Now, my question: Does all the love happen today? If Uncut Gems came out on Dec. 13, 2025, instead of Dec. 13, 2019, does it get the same reception?

Time and place

The movie was conceived in 2009, when legal sports betting in America was a fantasy. It was filmed in fall 2018, mere months after PASPA got struck down. It came out in December 2019, when sports betting was legal in maybe a dozen states and the conversation around it was still mostly, “wait, I can just bet on football now?” The people who were worried about it were there, sure. But they were background noise.

There weren’t governors, like Ohio’s Mike DeWine, who would say he “absolutely” regrets signing the legalization bill in his state. Heck, Ohio was still almost four years away from legalization. The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, probably Ladies’ Home Journal and Ranger Rick hadn’t run the hit pieces yet. Kalshi wasn’t a word. No state legislatures were tripping over themselves to ban prop bets. No federal bills. No Jontay Porter. None of it.

That’s all different now. The backlash is loud and ongoing. And in this environment, I genuinely don’t know if Uncut Gems, released today, gets the same love.

Here’s what critics would have to deal with: The movie is a compelling, watchable two hours of a gambling addict destroying his life, and it makes you like him the whole way through. It doesn’t moralize. It doesn’t end with Howard in recovery, surrounded by his family, having learned his lesson. It ends with Howard winning (then dying, yes, but still, winning), so the last gambling feeling the movie leaves you with is the joy of the parlay hitting.

And of course, that’s not the only bet Howard won, or at least would’ve won. The six-leg parlay from earlier in the movie that got canceled on him would’ve won as well. It was practically sexual when he “won.” Howard was right on a pair of stupid longshot parlays. To use the parlance of our times: LFG!

I wonder if a film critic in 2025, someone steeped in this whole moment, writing for a publication that’s done a dozen pieces on gambling addiction this year, can just let that go. Or if they would feel like they need to say the movie “glamorizes” it, “normalizes” it, pick your word.

Place and time

But how a movie lands depends on when it lands. Time changes things. Look at, say, Soul Man, where the lead character pretends to be Black. Or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which I just watched with my 12-year-old and forgot how anti-gay and transphobic it was. Or Sixteen Candles, in which a female character who is passed out drunk is literally given to someone to, quite potentially, rape. (And let’s not even bring up Long Duk Dong.)

These movies would be killed by critics today. The writers and directors would probably be kicked out of Hollywood.

Anyway, back to Gems: It’s the last gambling movie to get released to the theaters and really matter, and the industry it’s depicting has grown by a factor of infinity in the years since. You’d think that would be rich territory for filmmakers. A guy making his third DraftKings deposit of the day during his lunch break. Howard Ratner, but his bookie has a responsible gambling dashboard he’s never clicked on.

That movie hasn’t been made. Maybe somebody’s writing it right now, like the Safdies in 2009, thinking they have 10 years to figure it out.

Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t.

Howard Ratner? He would’ve taken the over on 10 years. He also would’ve added the opening tip.