Rather than conclude with a declaration of gambling’s perpetual hopelessness, “Rounders” ends with a bright-eyed, determined Damon on his way to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. The moral of “California Split,” memorably snarled by Elliott Gould in the film’s final scene, is: ”None of it meant anything, did it?” “Rounders,” by contrast, ends with Damon’s saying: “First prize at the World Series of Poker is a million bucks. Does it have my name on it? I don’t know. … But I’m gonna find out.” We aren’t supposed to feel inspired, exactly, but we are at least expected to wish him luck.

“The Hustler,” the landmark 1961 pool hall film, sidles in somewhere between “California Split” and “Rounders.” Fast Eddie Felson is the most charming of the bunch (owing, in no small part, to Paul Newman’s good looks, which are on full display here), but he also withholds the most. His secrets stay secret. When he finally gets over in the film’s last scene, he looks at his vanquished rival, Minnesota Fats, and says, “Fat man, you play a beautiful game of pool.” Felson’s hustling days might be over, but he still appreciates the game. There is a glimmer of dignity there.

The degenerate who falls deeper into degeneracy; the triumphant cardsharp who finally beats the house; the hustler who wants to play for the love of the game over the love of the gamble. Of these three, only the degenerate reflects reality. The cardsharp and the reformed hustler are the degenerate’s pornography. All three are “real,” insofar as the pornography is what keeps the degenerate going. He does not exist if not for this glimmer of false hope.

“Mississippi Grind,” the latest entry in the litany of American gambling movies, borrows from all three of these archetypes. The film follows a down-and-out gambler named Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) and his new friend, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), as they take a gambling trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The setup is familiar — Gerry owes money to everyone around town, so when Curtis shows up and inspires a short-lived change of luck, Gerry corrals his new friend and pulls up stakes in search of a run of hot cards.

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writers and directors of “Mississippi Grind,” clearly know their genre inside out. Mendelsohn might not have a beautiful face, but no one suffers quite as haggardly or as creepily as he does. The film is a collection of references and homages that hover, satellite-like, around whatever torment happens to be passing across Mendelsohn’s face. But like a basketball team that signs a huge star without building a team around him, Boden and Fleck seem far too content to coast on the idea of Mendelsohn-as-degenerate, without giving him a fully developed film to inhabit. It feels as if Boden and Fleck present us with rote gambling scenes and a rote gambler’s face and expect us to find something new. I, at least, never did.

As a result, the first 90 minutes of “Mississippi Grind” feel like a pastiche of other gambling movies — sometimes literally, as when Mendelsohn and Reynolds quote snippets of dialogue from “The Hustler” (“Some people are just born to lose”). They run through card rooms with the confidence of Steve McQueen in “The Cincinnati Kid.” And they enact the classic gambling-movie conflict, in which the chatty confidence of youth smacks up against the weariness of degeneracy masked in something that’s supposed to look like wisdom but never does.

There are many spots where “Mississippi Grind” goes astray (the film begins with an image of a rainbow, a metaphor that is humped along throughout the movie, complete with its metaphoric pot of gold), but one of them felt particularly instructive, not so much in terms of good or bad filmmaking, but more in terms of how the gambling genre works. At the film’s outset, Boden and Fleck present Mendelsohn and Reynolds as men without pasts. As the trip goes on, however, we learn more about both men: Gerry has an estranged wife and daughter; Curtis suffered abuse at the hands of his grandfather as a child.