If you had many, many billions but only a few weeks to live, what would you do? We can imagine that a fair few people would jet around the world, while others might spend it all on frivolous stuff. Perhaps you’d tuck it all into the pockets of charities but leave yourself enough for an all-expenses Butlins trip.
The ‘billion dollar question’ is something that the moody and pensive Jake Foley (Russell Crowe, both acting and directing) has clearly been stewing over. His answer, rather unusually, is to host an incredibly high-stakes poker game with some childhood friends. He’s putting up the stakes – five million dollars each, to be precise – with the stipulation being that all four of his friends have to say yes. If anyone pulls out, the money is off the table and they all have to make do with their choice of car each. It’s not a bad Deal or No Deal.
But it’s all a ruse. Because the poker game is clearly a front for something else. The friends are all up to something, making hushed phone calls on the journey there, and there’s the hint of something being cooked up by Jake, too. There’s a Lock Stock-like dance playing out here, as you wonder how different factions are going to meet and double-cross each other, and the opening half-hour of Poker Face offers a lot of promise.
It’s a very British joy, but there’s also some satisfaction in playing spot-the-soap-star too. Poker Face is an Australian movie, financed and filmed in Australia with Antipodean actors, and quite a few of them have played characters in Home & Away and Neighbours. There’s something joyful about seeing an actor who you watched roughly twenty years ago pop up in a high-budget thriller.
Liam Hemsworth, fresh from the announcement that he will be playing Geralt in The Witcher, is in there too, and immediately sets off alarms. He’s meant to be the childhood friend of Russell Crowe’s character, and no matter how much grey they put in the hair, the age-gap is just too apparent. There’s no way they grew up together, and we felt the aftershock of an immersion break.
The preamble then moves to the poker table. It’s a trick that Poker Face likes to pull: not quite settling on a genre, and leaving you guessing what kind of movie it is. At this point, with the literal high-stakes revealed, you wonder whether we’re stepping into a poker movie: a Rounders or Maverick. We were on board, perhaps through conscious bias as we like a bit of poker, but also because there was a cute backdrop to the game: would the characters’ ‘tells’ be visible, both for the game, and the schemes they have elsewhere?
But with attention deficit, Poker Face ignores its own title and barely plays one hand. Instead, it skitters over to a new sub-genre – the home invasion movie – and becomes so disappointingly generic that we were mentally writing better scripts as everything played out. The mystery box is opened, and inside is a cut-rate Assault on Precinct 13.
Without a high concept to hide behind, the craft becomes exposed. We barely get to know the characters in Poker Face, as they are mostly just sweat, sly glances and hidden motivations. That’s fatal to Poker Face, as we’re meant to slowly like them for the ending to work. When their main characteristics are the terrible things they did in the past, it’s hard to find yourself warming to them. RZA turning up as a multi-billionaire himself, about halfway through, felt like an opportunity to redeem things and make it personable, because the shifty Russell Crowe was never going to do it. But he’s sidelined and barely gets a word in edgeways.
The direction is slick and full of quick-edits, and you see what Russell Crowe, in director mode, is reaching for. There are echoes of Stephen Soderbergh and particularly Oceans 11 throughout Poker Face, but only echoes. It doesn’t manage to mesh the style with some humanity – only one of the latter additions to the party really manages to bring any charm with them – which Soderbergh always managed to cut into the deck.
There’s another film that casts a shadow over Poker Face, and the awkward proximity of the two probably didn’t help. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Tale also told the story of a billionaire, bringing his friends to a multi-million retreat, for nefarious purposes and the odd murder. Even the poker room that forms the stage feels very familiar, with expensive paintings in glass cases, each with just as much plot-significance as Rian Johnson’s superior movie. The comparison doesn’t do Poker Face many favours, as they’re both slightly too smug about their own wit and cleverness, but Glass Onion has more to back it up.
The frustration is that the shape of an enjoyable, twist-laden thriller was there at the start. When Poker Face has its cards close to its chest, a sly look on its face, we were prepared for big things. But then there was the flop, and it turned out that Poker Face had a low pair.
With all the possibilities it had ahead of itself, Poker Face bet large on very little, and we ended up with the most damning criticism of all: a thriller that didn’t thrill.
You can buy or rent Poker Face from the Xbox Store
Over the next few weeks, we are going to be trying something new: we’re going to be reviewing some of the new releases in the Xbox Film and TV Store. Let us know what you make of these features in the comments below.
