Gambling movies are rare... with the exception of Maverick, and to a lessr extent The Color of Money
, most gambling movies just don't make it. Why? I don't know... is it because no one wants to see someone else win lots of money, that can't be it because you always see a crowd gathered around the luck guy at the blackjack tables. Why they aren't popular I don't know, but movies about gambling just aren't something people want to see. Which is why the release of a movie completely about poker (and I mean completely, there is hardly anything else to the plot) is a suprose. However, this particular gambling movie, Rounders, stars Matt Damon, one of the top draws of teenage girls in America so it is bound to do alright.
Mikey (Matt Damon) with his girl Jo (Gretchen Mol)
This gambling movie starts out with a Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) getting up in the middle of the night and getting huge stacks of money out of various hiding places around his apartment. He then kisses his girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol) goodbye while she is still sleeping and leaves to go to an illegal underground poker club to play in a winner take all game with the owner of the club who is a Russian mobster known as Teddy KGB (John Malkovich). Since it is early in the movie you would guess right if you figured Mikey lost all his money ($30,000), but not because Teddy was better, but because Mike got to arrogant and didn't pick up some of the signs. We then flash ahead a few months and find out that Mike has quit poker completely at the request of Jo and has agreed to focus on his Law School studies. This deal was fine until his best friend Lester Murphy (Ed Norton), better known as Worm, gets out of prison. Now Mike has the peer pressure to go back to poker since Worm and him used to work together as "Rounders" and win money off unsuspecting, non-professional, players. So, predictably, he plays... gets caught and subsequently dumped by Jo. Then Mike finds out that Worm owes about $25,000 to a loan shark who is working for Teddy KGB (not a man you want to be in debted to). So now he has to start playing poker every chance he can get to get his friend out of death's grasp. After playing several games, Worm gets caught dealing from the bottem of the deck to give Mike a better hand and both of them are beaten up and all of there money is taken. Worm, the good friend that he is, skips town and leaves Mike to borrow money and play against... you guessed it, Teddy KGB to save himself and his friend.
Worm (Ed Norton) tries to get Mikey to play again
Like I said not much of a plot besides poker. The basic gyst of the movie is this, Mike is a nice guy but he can't help the fact that he is a great poker player and that he loves it... so he gives up his girlfriend and his life as a future lawyer to save his best friend and play a few hands. That is the whole movie right there... the rest is a bunch of shots around various tables, with various people being pissed at Mike for one reason, he is taking their money. Despite this, I liked it. Normally any movie with such a week plot would be kicked to the curb, but for some reason it was fun to watch this guy I had no real reason to like play poker for his life. That was probably part of it, if he lost, he was dead... and really, who wouldn't want to see Matt Damon slowly tortured by a Russian Mafia boss? But that wasn't it, it was just fun... probably the same reason people watch the lucky guy at the Blackjack table, or why the World Series of Poker is brodcast on ESPN. But just the fact that watching somebody win isn't enough to save the bad plot.
Rating:
2 ¼ out of five stars... unless you really like poker
