Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Poker player tries to avoid being sucked back into the world of hard cases playing high-stakes games, but a friend from prison sets him on the road to decline.
Biased, pithy comments: What makes this movie compelling and (at some level, anyway) worth watching is the deft combination of acting and editing; careful closeups on the first-rate cast who are showing the strains of the game through their poker faces. The story, too, hardly stops moving even as the action is more or less low-key (it's mostly playing cards). The voice-overs, too, are intergal to insight into this otherwise daft character, since otherwise one couldn't figure out why Damon would leave Mol. What stopped me from really liking this film was the absurdity of the plot. Talk about contrived---from the judge who can only come up with \$10,000 to Damon being incapable of securing a credit card loan for the relatively low figure that is owed, every twist and turn is there only because the author of the script willed it to be so. The rest of the story was fighting against these two-by-fours of unbelieveability. Other people will not be bugged by this as I was, but as a lightly-seasoned editor of fiction, it just made me sigh as the story went on. Damon rounds out an awesome cast---Turturro was probably my favorite. Your mileage will probably vary.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Matt Damon, Gretchen Mol, John Malkovich, Paul Cicero, Ray Iannicelli, John Turturro.
Directed by: John Dahl