ROUNDERS (1998)

Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) is a hardworking Joe putting his way through law school.  The way that he does this is by playing poker.  "Poker isn't gambling," Mike ruminates in his occasional voiceovers, "Poker is work, grinding out your winnings bit by bit."  Mike dispenses little bit of wisdom like this throughout, most of which are actually pretty good ("If you can't figure out who the sucker is in your first 20 minutes at the table, then you're him.")  At the beginning of the flick, Mike loses all his savings in a game of high-stakes no-limit to Teddy KGB (John Malkovich) and decides to go legit and focus just on the law and his girl, Jo (Gretchen Mol, whose nipples famously jutted out so tri-dimensionally in Vanity Fair recently).  Destiny, in the form of his old childhood friend Worm (Edward Norton), drags him back though to the thing that he's best at, and it's not long before Mike is playing poker, literally, to save his life.

The poker scenes are entertaining and the script is particularly good at unobtrusively teaching you the lingo and what to look for in the games.  But the whole formula of good guy dragged back into the crap by the friend who everyone but the hero can see is a cheat, a loser, and flake is old, old, old, and so much of the movie suffers from the same sorts of scenes over and over again (Mike starts to win and save his and Worm's asses, Worm, despite being told to stay out, gets involved and makes things worse, Mike chastises Worm and Worm apologizes, Mike goes back to his straight world life and realizes that he's fucking up, Mike promises to Jo that he won't do it again, Mike gets notified by one of his buddies that Worm's in trouble, Mike goes to get Worm out of trouble, go to beginning of parenthetical and repeat for two-thirds of the movie) that only the script's chatter and the actor's devotion to their craft prevents the thing from being a boggy, inert sump.

The movie doesn't make all the cliched moves, of course;  Jo dumps Mike and he stays dumped, Worm gets his ass out of Dodge when things look helpless and his ass stays gotten, and when Mike goes to his poker mentor/buddy (Jon Turturro) for scratch to get himself out of his hole, his mentor doesn't. And, as I said, there's some nice acting.  There's a close-up of Damon when he realizes Teddy KGB's "tell," and I swear you can actually see Damon's eyes light up with the knowledge.  Good work, Matt.  But so much of it is the same old, same old, that there's no way that I can jump up and down and say that there's anything more here than a potboiler with a good ear for jargon.

And after it was over, I had to admit that the movie is probably kinda socially irresponsible.  For all those mooks out there with a gambling problem, Rounders will drive them to their vices faster than a chauffeured rocketcar.  Poker may not be gambling, as everyone in this movie says over and over, but for all the guys who really do gamble, at poker and at all other things, this movie will be for them what a movie about championship smack shooters that ends with the guy realizing that it's his destiny to shoot smack and then winning the ultimate smack shooting match, would be for heroin junkies.  They probably don't need any help justifying their habits to themselves, but this movie sure won't hurt the process any, either.

So, you know, Rounders.  Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours, unless you've got the sickness, in which case you should probably stay away.

More about this movie

And a great little guide to all those cool terms like 'berry patch' and 'the nuts'

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