Mark Reviews Movies: POKER FACE

Poker Face, Screen Media Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2022

A dying man decides to set his affairs in order with an elaborate plan in Poker Face. Well, that's one mode of the several attempted by director Russell Crowe's screenplay, which the filmmaker/star apparently re-tooled from a previous one by Stephen M. Coates (He gets credit for an original screenplay and the story). Even if one weren't aware of the script tinkering, the movie makes the process painfully apparent in the story's continual indecisiveness.

Crowe plays Jake, a professional gambler—or at least he was at one point—and tech mogul worth billions of dollars. A few introductory sequences give us this and some other information, although the way the narrative rushes through some very important details—how Jake's love of gambling transformed into he and a friend creating the most intricate surveillance program known to humankind, for example—feels as if Crowe is trying to hastily justify how the plot functions.

The key items are that he's dying, that he has a group of childhood friends who have grown apart over the years (A lengthy prologue introduces the existence of these friends without establishing much else about any of them), and that Jake wants to reveal his secret to them—and get them to reveal their secrets to him. After a lot of delaying and hinting and setting up the particulars of how Jake will accomplish his goal, there's some more delaying and hinting and further establishing the details of how Jake will achieve his plan.

Throughout all of this, Crowe at least offers some sense of regret and melancholy for his imminent mortality, but the character here feels manufactured to be able to pull off such the stunt he's planning, instead of coming across as an actual person. That sense of characters fitting into the needs of plot extends beyond Jake, too. For example, he has a wife—his second after the first died a decade ago in an unspecified manner, briefly seen in quick flashbacks—named Nicole (Brooke Satchwell), whose only defining characteristic is that we see her boxing. Obviously, that will come into play later, or else it wouldn't be here.

There's the big, plot-necessitating fact, of course, that Jake has access to that surveillance system, used by governments around the world and implemented by him to spy on his group of friends. The system was developed by his best friend Drew (RZA), who doesn't show up until the second act, because, despite how important this relationship supposedly is to Jake, the friend really doesn't matter, except because of what he made.

The premise, which has Jake drugging his pals with a kind of truth serum (There's a lengthy sequence of Jake obtaining it from a kind of sweat lodge), seems promising. Jake gathers alcoholic Michael (Liam Hemsworth), author Alex (Aden Young), politician Paul (Steve Bastoni), and his attorney Sam (Daniel MacPherson) to a high-stakes poker game at his remote estate. The game is just an excuse, of course, in order to get the friends to reveal secrets Jake already knows. In theory, that makes the ruse pointless, unless the story actually is about these guys discussing and coming to terms with what they have done to each other and to make a mess of their own lives.

Anyway, the game and the truth-telling session is suddenly interrupted by Victor (Paul Tassone), who has come to Jake's remote manor to steal some artwork. Nothing that has been established and built up to, then, actually matters—except that the wife can fight, since she and Jake's daughter Rebecca (Molly Grace) show up in the middle of the robbery to confront him about the fatal diagnosis he has kept a secret. The third act amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse, with the group of friends hiding in Jake's panic room, the robbers providing a brief art lesson as they search the house, and a rather unconvincing standoff that resolves one plot thread—the one that seemingly comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with Jake, his family, his pals, and him wrestling with his mortality.

Everything until the movie's random turn into the territory of a thriller possesses a bit of promise, as we gradually learn about Jake's condition, his scheme, and the way these relationships have become strained over the years. It suggests a more intimate, character-based tale. For whatever reason within the script and movie's developments, Poker Face definitively decides not to be that story, and the shift is jarring in a most confounding and disappointing way.

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