There are certainly strategies worse than going all-in on New York City neighborhood flavor to sustain a crowd-pleaser. It isn’t just the power of location shooting, but also the access to a vast array of untapped, scruffy actors living in the area. Put a bunch of them in a van with a pizza and that could be solid enough foundation for a film. It could even be called something simple — like “Caper.” Does it really need to be more complicated than that?

Perhaps not always, but definitely here. Writer-director Dean Imperial loses on such a gamble with his tedious feature debut, which tracks an unhinged night of escapades between a bunch of poker buddies. Some of them are pushing middle age, several are even a few years past it, but they’re all about to turn juvenile. One of their compadres (Ron Palais) is spiraling toward suicide after erroneously...