I watched Rounders again last night. The movie is ten years old and holds up pretty well, but if you don’t play poker, you probably never thought it was any good in the first place. It came out way before no-limit Texas Hold’em hit the mainstream. Here are excerpts from a few of the reviewers I read [and my comments in brackets]:

“Though the stakes are always high at the gambling table, they’re pretty low when the film is away from it … John Malkovich shows up, as a Russian mobster. Imagine the danger to the scenery with Malkovich turned loose with a Russian accent.” — Mick LaSalle [the scenes with Malkovich make me laugh out loud, I love Malkovich.]

“John Malkovich has a field day with this role, with a vowel-bending accent that turns ‘O.K.’ into a drawling ‘Ak-yay’ … these gamblers live in a realm where a pair of aces beats a seductive babe every time. Famke Janssen slinks through the film as what would be an attractive alternative to card-playing in any other story.” — Janet Maslin

“Rounders—a vehicle for Matt Damon as a poker-hustling whiz kid—is an unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work. Damon’s latest working-class genius may only feel fully alive when he’s playing cards, but that’s not something one could say for the movie.” — J. Hoberman

“Most gambling movies are dire warnings; this one is a recruiting poster … The movie buys into the seedy glamor of poker, romanticizing a game that essentially consists of exhausted technicians living off brief bursts of adrenaline generated by risking everything they own or can borrow … I am not sure I follow the Professor’s reasoning when he lends his student $10,000 and calls it a mitzvah [LOL] … Rounders sometimes has a noir look but it never has a noir feel, because it’s not about losers (or at least it doesn’t admit it is). It’s essentially a sports picture, in which the talented hero wins, loses, faces disaster, and then is paired off one last time against the champ. For a grimmer and more realistic look at this world, no modern movie has surpassed Karel Reisz’s ‘The Gambler’ (1974).” — Roger Ebert

“It makes one excellent point – you should be what you’re meant to be, and if you know what that is, you’re a lucky man. And if you’ve got the talent, you’re even luckier … (what is that accent Malkovich is doing? Urdu? Uzbeki? Uzi?) [no one knows but it makes everyone laugh] … It’s a movie of character and milieu, both of which it evokes brilliantly. Though it fizzles at the end, you won’t leave it thinking, I need to go somewhere new. You’ve just been somewhere new.” — Stephen Hunter [Hunter is my favorite movie critic by a mile — I almost never disagree with him.]

“John Malkovich chews the scenery as if he hadn’t eaten for a week … the mysteries of the Pyramids will probably have been revealed by the time anyone figures out exactly where Malkovich got his inscrutable Russian accent. ‘Count-eet!’ he barks as he passes a tray of poker chips to Damon early in the movie, and I couldn’t wait for him to show up and open his mouth again. When I heard lines like ‘You haefhv my muneey?’ and ‘Meestair son-of-a-beetch!’ I wasn’t disappointed. Malkovich is occasionally a fine actor but he’s played the beady-eyed bad dude too many times. What he does here isn’t a performance, but a stunt. It’s got to be a tough life, smearing bad accents all over your dialogue like margarine on a soda cracker.” — Stephanie Zacharek [Zacharek is smart and writes well but she’s a girl who doesn’t understand cards (pun intended).]

Here’s the speech given by Joey Knish (brilliantly played by John Turturro) when Mike, broke and desperate, asks him for money:

“‘Stones?’ You little punk. I’m not just playing for the thrill of f*cking victory here. I owe rent, alimony, child support. I play for money. My kids eat. I got stones enough not to chase cards, action, or f*cking pipe dreams of winning the World Series on ESPN. You want me to call some people, try and buy you some time, I will. Place to stay, or the truck. No problem. But about the money, I gotta do this. I gotta say no.”

I recommend the movie, but only to guys who play poker.