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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.55%
Worth A Look: 42.47%
Average: 17.81%
Pretty Bad: 9.59%
Total Crap: 9.59%
13 reviews, 68 user ratings
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Rounders |
by dionwr
"The short but sweet guide to what everyone else missed..."

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"Rounders" is a forgettable little movie that managed to slip in under a lot of people's radar. Audiences stayed away, and the folks who've seen it don't think much of it, without knowing why. It's simple, really--this is a film about a man struggling against an addiction--and losing completely.What's worse, the film is clearly on the side of the addiction, cheering it on. If Damon had played a heroin addict or alcoholic instead of a compulsive gambler, they wouldn't have dared make it this way.
Maybe they *SHOULD* have made it about Matt Damon as a heroin addict or alcoholic who boldy follows his addiction. Go for black comedy, perhaps. It would be more interesting than this tepid pseudo-drama.
Damon, in the film, gives up a promising start in law school, gets beaten up, loses his girlfriend, and abandons his entire life, to follow his gambling addiction. This is presented as an upbeat and positive life choice.
The crossed wire here is that the makers of this film go to some trouble to show that Damon has real ability at playing poker. He can magically size people up and know (mostly!) when they're bluffing and when he's got them.
Problem is, that's not why he's playing. He's playing because he can't keep himself away. It's good he has some skill at the game, or his life would be even more quickly ruined than it is by the end of the film, and his circumstances more wretched. But it's irrelevant. He is playing because he cannot stop himself.
And, remember, he only MOSTLY knows what's going to happen next. Eventually he's going to lose.
There is a lot of talent on display in this film--Edward Norton, Martin Landau, and John Malkovich are all in the cast, but the intellectual acuity that came up with this could fit comfortably within the left nostril of a bee.
A story of someone risking everything to develop their own unique talent can and has made for good movies in the past, but it shows a deep moral blindness of these filmmakers that they are trying to cast this story in those terms. That's not what's going on here.It may be how the character sees himself, but the true story here should end with him as a homeless man in a ditch, drinking Ripple and going over in his mind, endlessly, that last big game that went bad.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=66&reviewer=301 originally posted: 02/21/02 17:46:51
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USA 11-Sep-1998 (R) DVD: 07-Sep-2004
UK N/A
Australia 11-Feb-1999 (MA)
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