I must confess, poker is a game I’ve never demonstrated any real facility for. Partly, it’s because my poker face is less Amarillo Slim and more Zero Mostel in “The Producers.” Also, several key attributes to succeeding in the game, namely a head for quick computations and an innate understanding of the intricacies of human behavior, are not exactly tops in my particular skill set. Like chess, I understand the game’s basic machinations as well as a player’s ultimate goal. But all the stuff that comes in between—flops, rivers, and the like—remains a mystery that people have attempted to explain to me over the years without any real success.
However, I’ve seen enough movies about poker to recognize which are the good ones (Robert Altman’s magnificent “California Split” and “The Cincinnati Kid”) and which aren’t (“Runner Runner” and “A Big Hand for the Little Lady”). Now comes “Dead Money”; while I can’t vouch for how accurately it depicts the game, it doesn’t amount to much regarding the other things one hopes to see in a movie: tension, excitement, or interesting characters and situations. It isn’t necessarily a bad movie, just a mediocre one that only reminds you of all the better films it aspires to be like.
The film opens with an illegal poker game run out of the home of degenerate gambler Jack (David Keith), where the attendees include professional poker player Andy (Emile Hirsch), his med student girlfriend Chloe (India Eisley), and hotshot cop LT (Peter Facinelli). Before long, the game is interrupted by a couple of masked men who bust in, break Jack’s nose, and make off with all the winnings. Afterward, the participants call it a night. But when Andy returns to Jack’s house to retrieve Chloe’s book bag, he discovers that Jack—in dire need of money to cover his mounting debts—had arranged to have his own game robbed by knucklehead lowlifes Wendell (Jackie Earle Haley) and the badly wounded Uncle Lonnie (Rory Culkin) to keep it all for himself. Having gone undetected by Jack and Wendell as they take care of Uncle Lonnie, Andy grabs the money for himself and flees.
The next morning, Andy, who has been on a cold streak of late, decides to take advantage of the situation by paying off his current debts and then lying low for a while. A sensible plan, but one that falls apart when he goes to make his payment and winds up getting sucked into yet another game. This time, all the breaks begin to go his way. Over the next few hours, he goes on a hot streak that eventually finds him playing at a high-stakes game run by the quietly malevolent Faizel (Jimmy Jean-Louis) and attended by legendary player Bobby Kirkland (Brennan Brown). While all this is happening, Jack and Wendell have figured out that Andy took the money and head to his house to find it, taking Chloe hostage when she unexpectedly turns up. Once Jack realizes that Andy has gone to Faizel’s, he shows up and, recognizing that Andy is on a roll, tells him to win $500,000 or else Chloe will be killed, a demand that becomes trickier when his luck seems to abandon him at just the wrong moment.
As you can probably surmise from my description, “Dead Money” essentially comes across as a combination of “Rounders” and all the Tarantino-inspired crime movies of the late ’90s. Features include overly colorful dialogue, twisty plots, and characters who spend much of their screen time pointing a gun at someone’s head or slowly bleeding out from a previous unfortunate encounter. Josh Wilcox’s screenplay covers the bases regarding the surface details but doesn’t do much anything else of interest. This leaves us watching a bunch of dumb people doing dumb things, while occasionally offering up lovingly detailed narration about the intricacies of poker.
The games themselves aren’t quite as implausible as the over-the-top ones seen in a film like “Maverick.” However, they are also not nearly as entertaining, either, because director Luc Malpoth handles the material in a manner that, like the script, is slick but shallow. He never quite generates any real suspense, not even when various characters have their lives on the line or point guns at each other’s heads. The actors aren’t able to do much with their thinly drawn characters—Hirsch is fairly blah in the lead, Eisley spends most of her screen time tied to a chair with tape on her mouth, and Keith, Haley, and Facinelli seem to be having a private competition to determine which one of them will deliver the most “colorful” performance. (My vote goes to Haley, if only for the way he wistfully states that he plans to use his share to establish and run his own cockfight.)
In the end, “Dead Money” is little more than a modern equivalent of the B movies of old, a meat-and-potatoes programmer designed to appear as the less heralded bottom half of a double feature. Unfortunately, it’s devoid of the kind of seasoning that might have made it into something far more memorable. Perhaps poker aficionados will find it to be accepted enough to tide them over as they wait for “Rounders 2: The Desolation of the Oreos.” Otherwise, this film will leave most viewers wanting to fold long before it ends.
