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'Rounders' Plays The Same Old Hands.
By Stacey Richter
FIVE MINUTES INTO Rounders I already had the entire
plot figured out. This is because I've seen Rocky: Guy
loses big, guy works hard, guy learns about life, guy wins big.
Sure, a lot of movie plots are predictable, but few of them, especially
those that fall into the sort-of thriller genre, are as thoroughly
predictable as this one. Red Rock West and The Last
Seduction, director John Dahl's previous movies, certainly
showed more originality and spunk. Rounders, by contrast,
is calculating and flat. I don't know anything about first-time
screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppleman, but I can sure
tell they've watched a lot of movies. Rounders is about
playing poker and friendship and love, but rather than actually
being about these subjects, it's as though the screenwriters
sat around in a room for a couple of years watching movies about
them.
It's annoying, to say the least. None of the main characters
seem especially vivid, few of their actions are at all surprising,
and it's all vaguely familiar. "Rounders," by the way,
are guys who play poker for a living, an unsavory and poorly groomed
bunch of men who would just as soon sock you as toss a chip at
you. Except for Mike McDermott (the apple-cheeked Matt Damon).
Mike is a nice boy who goes to law school and always wears a pea
coat like he's auditioning to be in the J. Crew catalogue. But
beneath this veneer of respectability crouches one hell of a poker
player, a sort of poker playing genius. You know, kind of like
the math genius Damon played in Good Will Hunting.
Mike takes a fall early on though, losing his entire bankroll
to a scruffy Russian in a soiled sweat suit known as KGB (John
Malkovitch). So he swears off his beloved game entirely, much
to the delight of his uptight, pixie-faced girlfriend (Famke Janssen),
who hates his poker playing vehemently, even though it's the only
interesting thing about Mike. And even though all she ever does
is fix her hair and whine at him for playing cards, Mike is determined
to please her, and to give up poker, and just be a regular guy
in a pea coat, etc.
But then Mike's buddy Worm (Edward Norton II) gets out of jail.
Norton is the only person in Rounders who seems to be having
any fun with his role, and his portrayal of the shifty, self-destructive
Worm definitely spices things up. It's unfortunate that his character,
as written by Levien and Koppleman, is basically a reprise of
the self-destructive, shifty Johnny Boy played by Robert DeNiro
in Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets. The whole middle portion
of Rounders, as a matter of fact, is dedicated to reprising
Mean Streets--a good movie, but I'm starting to wish it
never existed so that all the bad imitations of it wouldn't exist,
either. In Mean Streets there are two friends, one bad
and one good. They're old buddies who love each other, yet the
bad boy seems unable to stop getting into trouble, and the good
boy seems unable to stop trying to save him. In Rounders,
Worm is able to lie, trick, cheat and steal money from Mike, and
then to get him beaten to a pulp. Mike keeps saying, in his annoying
voice-overs, "I just had to give him one more chance."
Between all this co-dependent, sappy relationship dross, there
are scenes of card playing. These are by far the most bearable
thing about the movie. Dahl manages to make a game wherein the
players struggle to reveal no emotion look exciting. The supporting
retinue of habitual poker players are perfectly cast--dissipated
and fat, with too much jewelry and ugly shirts and the kind of
facial hair you rarely see on the big screen. There's a great
scene where Mike and Worm go to Atlantic City and fleece a revolving
assortment of hapless vacationers, all poorly dressed and utterly
lacking in glamour.
It's especially fun to watch Worm during the card-playing scenes.
He's wound-up and appropriately doomed, but Norton plays the character
with a surprising lightness and humor. Norton certainly deserves
his prominent billing beside Damon, who's terrible in his role.
He's supposed to be a great poker player, but with his gee-shucks/cat-who-swallowed-the-canary
facial tics, it's entirely apparent when he's bluffing, or not
bluffing.
At least I learned one original fact from watching this movie:
Good poker players need to be good actors, and you can't fake
it by casting a bad actor as a good poker player.
Rounders is playing at El Dorado (745-6241)
and Foothills (742-6174) cinemas.
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