DEAD MONEY - Mark Reviews Movies

Dead Money, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 13, 2024

The main character of Dead Money might be a solid poker player, but he's a terrible thief. It's little wonder, then, that Josh Wilcox's screenplay spends so much time with Andy (Emile Hirsch) at various tables, facing off against assorted opponents, while the actual plot unfolds anywhere where he isn't. Andy would probably mess up things more than he does with minimal effort on his part, and the multiple poker sequences keep us distracted from how little actually happens in this story.

This does end up feeling like two completely different movies, with very different stakes, and with only a sizeable amount of cash connecting them. The one consistent between the two tales is the tone, which also doesn't feel right in the hands of director Luc Walpoth.

There are obvious jokes here, mainly in how incompetent the story's various players are and how it's only pure, dumb luck that keeps the worst from happening to our hero. The director must not have received the memo, because the whole of it is played as a straightforward, self-serious thriller.

Our main man is Andy, who's one of several people at a regular underground poker game at a local bar. It's run by Jack (David Keith), a guy who sticks to hard rules for the game but seems to keep himself out of any gambling. The other players are unimportant, for the most part, save for a cop known only as LT (Peter Facinelli), who keeps his service pistol on him despite one of Jack's cardinal rules, and Freddy (Michael Malarkey), who has a beef with Andy. He threatens to knock out Andy, who says the guy couldn't if he had a chance, and soon enough, the whole table is betting on that proposition.

All of this is mostly irrelevant to the plot, which might be why the lengthy scene is somewhat compelling. With only the intrigue and tension of watching big personalities try to read each other and butt heads when that becomes difficult, it plays as a study of that—and only that.

Anyway, a pair of masked men with guns show up, force all the men to strip to their underwear, and steal the whole of the pot, which adds up to about $200,000. LT gets a shot off as the robbers' getaway car speeds away, and everyone thinks that's the miserable end of the evening.

Driving his bartender girlfriend Chloe (India Eisley) back home, she realizes she has forgotten her bag, so Andy returns to the bar, hears an argument between three men upstairs, and finds a bag filled with about $200,000 in cash—the pot from the game. Andy takes it without the three noticing and, upon returning home, tells Chloe what happened.

This is a fair and fine enough setup for a thriller, perhaps, especially with the almost-always-reliable Hirsch playing a down-on-his-luck guy who can't believe his good fortune and becomes certain that his luck, as seems to be the trend, will run out again. There are few options for Andy and Chloe at this point in the story, who are unsure if the thieves will figure out that Andy swiped the stolen cash from them. Of all the possibilities, they choose probably the dumbest one imaginable: just continue with their day as if nothing has happened.

For Chloe, that means going to class to finish an important test, but for Andy, that means paying off a debt and traveling to different poker games around town, some of them involving people who know about the initial robbery through word of mouth or because they were actually there. This plan also counts on none of the thieves figuring out that he took the cash, and one would think a guy as observant as Andy, who's a regular at Jack's game, would know there are security cameras in and around the bar.

One has to ignore a lot for the premise to have any bit of believability. Maybe, then, it is a good thing that Wilcox basically bypasses that by keeping the robbers preoccupied elsewhere while Andy goes from poker game to poker game without a care in the world, not showing much worry or curiosity about why his girlfriend, with whom the robbers are preoccupied, won't answer her phone.

The bulk of the plot is split between the shenanigans with the robbers (Jackie Earle Haley plays the main masked man), as they keep Chloe tied up and don't seem to have any plan beyond that, and Andy narrating his philosophy of gambling as he plays game after game. It should be obvious that this is more a comedy than anything else, because the entire schematic of the dual narratives fails as a thriller. The stakes of the robber stuff are low, because they keep finding new and different ways to mess up and make things worse.

As for Andy's story, he's basically in another world, betting his way higher and higher in the gambling underground, and it's not until the third act of Dead Money that the two plots come together. It's a strangely structured and implemented movie, which undermines what might have been an interesting study of compulsion, a violently wacky thriller, or anything else it could have been with a clearer focus.

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