Movie review - The Card Counter
Barry Carter reviews the latest poker movie which sees Oscar Isaac as a professional poker player trying to stop an act of revenge.
Over the weekend I watched the latest poker movie to hit our screens, The Card Counter starring Oscar Isaac. He plays William Tell, a professional poker player and blackjack card counter who has a chance encounter with Cirk (Tye Sheridan), with whom he shares a common enemy. Tell takes this young man under his wing on the tournament circuit to try to encourage him not to seek revenge.
Whenever I review a poker movie I essentially have to do two reviews – the poker review and the actual movie review. Was poker presented how it actually is and was it a good movie from a pure storytelling perspective?
Most of the movies turn out to be quite good movies but bad poker movies, as the game is presented in a ridiculous way to avoid confusion and drive the plot (think that silly hand at the end of the game in Casino Royale). Or bad movies and bad poker movies.
The poker does not drive the plot
Separating the poker from the plot is easy in The Card Counter because poker doesn’t actually figure at all in the core storyline, despite making up most of the running time of the film. Tell meets Cirk early in the movie and the two discuss Cirk’s plans to get revenge on Gordo (William Dafoe). What follows for the bulk of the film is Tell bringing Cirk along the poker circuit as a distraction from his revenge goals, which Cirk does without much resistance, He doesn’t try to learn or play poker, he is happy to just hang around the casinos doing nothing and rarely mentioning the revenge that brought the two together.
This makes for a clumsy and disjointed movie, you almost forget that this was supposed to be a revenge movie until the end where the inevitable gets rushed out. The poker doesn’t drive the plot in any real way and it doesn’t act as a metaphor for the struggles the two main characters face, it is just a distraction. The blackjack card counting is even less consequential, he does it at the very start and you never see him do it again, so why it became the title of the film is beyond me.
Poker and blackjack played such an irrelevant role in driving the plot, it would be a bit like if Kill Bill started with Uma Thurman pledging to murder the namesake of the movie, only to go on a three month kayaking adventure for no reason before she actually got around to doing it.
A genuinely good depiction of poker staking
To review the poker on its own merits, it is quite respectfully done and we do see some things we have never seen on screen before. The poker circuit does actually look like the one we all know today. The characters are a little bit more colourful but that is Hollywood for you. There are no ridiculous odds hands other than one Tell recounts in a story about a hand he saw somebody else play. There are no gangsters, no cheats and no unlikely comebacks from a single chip.
What the movie does really well is explore the staking system in poker, with backers, stables, horses and even a mention of makeup. My favourite moment in the whole movie is when Tell talks about how the top tournament rankings you find online are often misleading precisely because of the staking deals in place. I actually wanted to stand up in the cinema and announce “this is accurate” to the non poker audience because it really is the last thing I’d expect to see in a mainstream poker movie.
If anything there is too much poker in the movie. After setting out the main plot point the characters just meander along on the poker circuit for seemingly no reason, which I think ultimately leaves mainstream audiences confused about what sort of movie they are actually watching. If you love poker movies I’d certainly watch it, but when it hits Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Most poker movies end up being bad at poker but a good movie, or bad at poker and a bad movie. The only ones I have seen that are good at the poker, good at the movie side of thing are Rounders and Molly’s Game. The Card Counter might be the first poker movie that I have seen that is good at the poker part but a bad movie in general. Which I guess is progress, of sorts, for people who care about how poker is depicted on the big screen.
Have you seen this movie yet? Let us know in the comments:
