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Starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Gretchen Mol, John Malkovich, John Turturro, Famke Janssen
Martin Landau. Directed by John Dahl.
Mike (Damon) loves to play poker - high stakes, big money poker. One night while his live-in girlfriend Lisa (Mol) is asleep, he goes to an exclusive underground poker club run by a Russian loan shark nicknamed KGB (Malkovich) to make his big score. He takes the $30000 they've saved up, and loses it all on one hand. Nine months later, Mike is working an all night delivery job to make ends meet, and to get him and Lisa through law school. He has promised not to do anymore poker playing, but she worries that he will. Enter the Worm (Norton), an old buddy of Mike's just released from prison. When they were boys, Worm took the fall for a prank they pulled at prep school, allowing Mike to finish and go to law school, and resulting in Worm being tossed out before graduation. His first night out, Worm has Mike and him playing poker in tandem, and fleecing some rich kids out of a bundle. Unfortunately, Worm owes $25000 in old debts he avoided by going to prison. He is being leaned on to pay it off quickly by a goon of KGB's. Mike plays the game honestly, "grinding" out the money by skill and reading the other players like his mentor Knish (Turturro), but Worm will cheat if he has to in order to win some money. And this gets Worm into trouble, drawing Mike into debt with a beautiful club owner (Janssen), into trouble with his kindly law professor (Landau) and Lisa, and into saving Worm from a very painful fate. It might seem unlikely that a film about poker could be exciting, but the poker scenes are among the strongest and most fun in the film. Turturro, Malkovich, Norton and Damon all illustrate the intensity of the game, in the reading of their opponents and beating them, and they are aided by table-level camera closeups and voiceover narration of strategy about the finer points of the game. Knowledge of poker helps in following the film, but the game they're playing was one I've never played and I was able to understand what the players were doing. But of course, the film is not really about poker, but about following your dream. Mike loves poker, but tries to give it up to go straight and make it at a conventional occupation. But he's not happy, and when he tells Lisa after his first night back at poker its the first time he's "felt alive" in nine months, she can't for the life of her understand how a stupid game could possibly mean that much. But it's what he loves. Several performances stand out. Malkovich is exceptional as the twitchy, sleazy Russian who loves Oreo cookies and taking other people's money. His unusual accent works well. Norton is a bundle of energy and attitude as the low-rent hustler with seemingly without conscience in using friends and opponents to take their money by any means he can get away with. Damon is also quite good, convincingly portraying a working class guy with big ambitions, although not convincingly portraying a guy who could have interest in pursuing the law. Turturro, Landau and Janssen all make good use of very small screen time in creating real, three-dimensional characters. Mol is, well, very, very cute, but her character is brutally underwritten, and their is absolutely no chemistry between her and Damon. And this illustrates one major weakness in the film - why would a conservative girl ever be with an on-the-edge risk taker like Mike at all, and especially after he blew their $30000. The film does not explain at all what the attraction is, and the actors interaction doesn't help. And there are other gaps in credibility too. First of all, after supposedly ignoring poker for nine months, Mike still seems to know where all the games in town are. Secondly, even knowing the kind of guy Worm is, Mike lets him run up a huge tab under Mike's name. And he and Worm treat this betrayal as no big deal. Thirdly, just as things start to crash around him, a person Mike has badly let down "loans" him $10000 on the spot, no questions asked. But overall, Rounders is a fast-paced, well-acted and often funny movie.   
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