"Rounders" - The Real Deal by Homer Yen (c) 1998
Poker players are a strange breed indeed. If they can't find their way to the poker rooms of the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City or to the fabled Mirage in Las Vegas where the best players in the world sit down, they'll still find a game somewhere. Maybe it'll be in the back room of some bar, or in the basement of some rundown building. And never mind the heavy smoke or cramped quarters or dank surroundings. These people are known as 'rounders.' Poker to them is a delirious mix of on-the-edge living and all-out warfare. For these people, the rippling of the cards is a call to arms, outplaying your opponents is the goal, and stacks of chips become their ammunition.
"Rounders" offers a fairly accurate exploration of this hidden world where fortunes are won and lost overnight and your only friends are the cards in your hands. Here, we meet up with Mike McDermott (Matt Damon). He is a card-playing whiz who has been financing his law school tuition through poker. But one bad hand costs him everything, and he vows to retire from the game. Worm (Ed Norton) is his friend who was just recently released from prison. He also plays cards but wins his fortunes through cheating. He owes a lot of money to some disreputable people, and Mike decides to continue to play in order to help him out.
The strength of this movie, however, does not lie within the story between Mike and Worm. For me, I was more intrigued with how it focused on the shady, almost-invisible environment and how it highlighted the many nuances that you have to master in order to play poker well. Being a mediocre poker player who periodically plays the 10-20 Hold 'em games at the Taj and one who can be labeled, to a certain degree, a 'rounder', the movie hits the mark in several areas. We see various types of players such as Kinish (John Torturro) who looks to win one or two hands an hour in order to grind out a living and David KGB (John Malkovich) who runs one of these poker rooms and whose weakness lies in the way he eats Oreos. The movie also accurately presents, through narratives, the psychology required to win. And it shows how playing can suck you into a vacuum as you forget about everything else around you.
I recall watching Maverick where the final few people played their last hands. One player held 4-of-a-kind; the villain held a 7-high straight flush and the winner miraculously won with a Royal Flush. Entertaining - yes; realistic no. This film could be considered the flip side of that movie. Authentic - yes; original - no. "Rounders" is more interesting than entertaining, but certainly one of the best movies whose subject matter is poker.
Grade: (B-) if you don't play poker; (B) if you do.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews