Hey, I Finally Saw…ROUNDERS

Now, when I’ve added to this feature in the past it was usually because I caught up with a classic, like the original TRUE GRIT or ERASERHEAD. But this time out, I’m just catching up with a movie that I’d been meaning to see since it came out fifteen years ago, I just never got around to it.

So now, mainly because I noticed that it’s just about to expire on Netflix Instant, I finally watched John Dahl’s 1998 poker-driven crime drama ROUNDERS.

But hold on, maybe it’s more than just a movie I missed - the A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias wrote an entry for it in their New Cult Canon series back in 2008.

Tobias argues convincingly that ROUNDERS is an extremely influential film that “lit the fuse on a multi-billion-dollar industry.” He points to the plethora of online poker sites that have endless usernames and/or avatars referencing the film as proof of its huge popularity among players.

For my first time watching it though, it felt less like an iconic celebration of the underworld of high-stakes gambling, and more like a slightly better than average late ‘90s crime drama that effectively maximizes on the then budding stardom of Matt Damon and Edward Norton. Both were fresh faced 20-somethings at the time, who had both gotten acclaim and in the case of Damon an Academy Award (shared with Ben Affleck for the GOOD WILL HUNTING screenplay).

In ROUNDERS, which is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “a player who knows all the angles and earns his living at the poker table,” there’s a familiar dynamic at work as Damon is, in a role similar to his working class but brilliant minded character in GOOD WILL HUNTING, the good guy trying to go straight, and Norton is the bad influence who wants Damon to get back in the game.

Damon, whose voice-over narration is overly prominent, has good reasons for turning his back on the lifestyle – he lost his entire life savings of $30,000 to a ridiculously accented Russian gangster played by a very hammy John Malkovich, and he promised he wouldn’t go near a card game again to his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol), who he is now in law school with.

Still, you know that he won’t be able to resist the lure of the game. Otherwise they’d be no movie, right? The basic premise boils down to the slimy Norton, who is actually nicknamed “Worm,” being heavily in debt, and his old partner Damon dusting off his mad poker skills to help his friend. This makes for some great gaming scenes, particularly one with the duo trying to hoodwink a room full of hard ass New Jersey State Troopers.

The second hour of ROUNDERS which begins with the nagging Mol leaving Damon to his gambling devices, is consumed by these tense gaming scenarios yet despite its predictable plotting, it still pulled me in.

I wasn’t interested as much in Damon’s predicament of choosing the proper father figure - Martin Landau as a muddled but wise professor and John Turturro as a somewhat beat down old-time rounder have hazy scenes in which they somewhat compete for the part, I think - than I was into the bad friend who manipulates his good friend basics this film nails.

Fanke Janssen is on the sidelines as a possible new love interest for Damon, but the movie doesn't seem too interested in that. The poker-powered bromance is what gets the spotlight.

In retrospect, the film foreshadows the relationship between Norton and Brad Pitt in FIGHT CLUB, which would be on Norton’s roster after his turn in AMERICAN HISTORY X (the era was busy for the actor). But if you’ve seen FIGHT CLUB you know what that relationship turned out to be.

ROUNDERS’ had a palpable impact on waves of impressionable poker players, many of who are no longer lulling about casinos or sleazy backrooms, but now playing high or low stake games comfortably at home in thousands of rooms online. For all you cyber-gamers out there, here are some of the better rooms available if you want to try your hand at some virtual Texas Hold’em, so you can sample the game yourself that provides the bookend scenes in which Damon goes up against Malkovich.

It may overly glorify the rush that makes a talented player like Damon’s character unable to quit the game, but it captures that pure excitement (Damon even regrettably tells Mol that he felt alive for the first time in 9 months when he sat back down at the table) so well that ROUNDERS may be the ultimate double edged sword of gambling movies.

ROUNDERS, which I’m glad I finally saw, is available for one more day on Netflix Instant (it expires at the end of February 1st).

More later…

The Way Too Dark, Dingy, And Disorienting HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS 

(Dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2013)

Warning: This review may contain Spoilers!

From the same lack of inspiration that brought you ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER comes this muddled mixture of the action genre with fairy tale mythology that, of course, is available as an IMAX 3D experience. I so wish I had the option of seeing a 2D advance screening, but I had to don the glasses and endure imagery that was way too dark, dingy, with tons of disorienting pans.

The story and the characters are just as dismal. Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton (best known for QUANTUM OF SOLACE and TAMARA DREW so she’s not very well known) are the title characters who we first meet as children (Cedric Eich and Alea Sophia Boudodimos respectively) going through the motions of the original Brothers Grimm tale.

After that cold opening, a cardboard-looking animated title sequence filled with fiery in-your-face CGI brings us up to speed that Hansel and his sister Gretel grow up to take on witch hunting full-time, with newspaper headlines praising their work along the way.

With anachronistic American accents, Renner and Arterton show up in a small German village to save a young woman (Pihla Viitala) suspected of being a witch from being burnt to death. Anyone who’s seen MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL will know how villagers in Medieval times react to possible witches, and these folks are especially riled up as they are goaded on by the evil Sherriff Berringer (Peter Stormare – no stranger to this setting as he was in Terry Gilliam’s THE BROTHERS GRIMM).

Arterton head butts Stormare, Viitala is freed, and the brother-sister duo start to investigate the abduction of several children from the town by witches. This plot serves just as a clothesline to hang together a bunch of annoyingly quick cut fight scenes that look terrible and fail to deliver any excitement.

Famke Janssen plays the real villain of a sorceress who can morph her face from a normal human look to a bad witch make-up job (go from zero to witch in 10 seconds?) since Stormare gets his head stomped on by what turns out to be a friendly troll in one of the film’s many gratuitous gore shots.

Of all the failed factors that make up this movie – the awful screenplay, the tedious tone, the overwrought score by Atli Örvarsson (IRON MAN), the unconvincing acting, the poorly plotted procedural, the clunky humor, and the addition of heavy artillery for the machine gun fire ‘em up finale – the only commendable factor present is that it’s only 88 minutes long.

More later...

TAKEN 2: The Film Babble Blog Review

TAKEN 2 (Dir. Olivier Megaton, 2012) 

I saw the original TAKEN (2008) for the first time last week, and I found it to be an entertaining yet typical formulaic thriller. It was like a Jason Statham movie, in which an indestructible badass takes out waves of attacking thugs on a quest to track down somebody or something, except that it has Liam Neeson in the Statham role.

In TAKEN, Neeson, as a highly-trained killing machine of a former CIA agent and an obsessively overprotective father, dealt with the kidnapping of his daughter (Maggie Grace) in Paris, France. In TAKEN 2, opening today in the Triangle at a multiplex near you, Neeson and his ex-wife (Famke Janssen reprising her role from the first one) are abducted on a trip in Istanbul, and it’s up to the daughter (Grace also returning) to save them. 

Or rather, assist her father to save the whole family via implausible cell phone instructions, and questionable directions to throw grenades at particular points.

The evil mastermind behind the kidnapping is Rade Šerbedžija, previously a Soviet villain on the popular Fox show 24, plays an Albanian Mafia Chief who wants revenge for the death of his son (killed in the first one by Neeson).

Neeson is able to escape but inexplicably leaves ex-wife Janssen behind, and we’re off to a bunch of action set-pieces sequences in which Neeson barks orders at daughter Grace, especially when she’s behind the wheel in an extended car chase that seemingly tries to jam in every single car chase cliché imaginable - even throwing in the overused oncoming train ploy. 

It’s such a cringe-worthy moment when Neeson, who just knows his daughter (who failed the driver’s test twice) can cross the tracks in time, that it feels like a cheesy parody when the bad guys’ black SUV collides with the train explosively, like we’ve seen so many times before.

Although there are unintentional laughs here and there in this badly shot, horribly edited definition of “unnecessary sequel,” they weren’t enough to keep me from yawning throughout. There are no surprises, or interesting ideas whatsoever in TAKEN 2; it exists only because the first one was a huge hit and its only goal is to try to repeat the formula and hope it pays off again.

To get an idea about how interchangeable these action movie franchise entries are, consider that the first TAKEN was directed by Pierre Morel, who was the cinematographer of THE TRANSPORTER, and worked as a first unit camera operator on TRANSPORTER 2 - actual Jason Statham movies! TAKEN 2 director Olivier Megaton (is that his real name? Awesome if it is) directed TRANSPORTER 3. See what I mean?

Even rabid fans of the first one will find TAKEN 2 to be a big fail of a followup. With hope, maybe now the 60 year old Neeson can finally get over wanting to be a big action star, and go back to, you know, acting?

More later...