Dario Argento combines aspects of his greatest hits with Aughts trends in “The Card Player” (2003), an ultimately ridiculous but incongruously watchable giallo. While the dubbing approach is the same as in all his films, it’s somehow blunter and stupider here, maybe because scenes are staged such that we wonder if this is a comedy. (I think it kind of is.)
The film prefigures “Saw” (2004) and the American “torture porn” genre in combining gamesmanship with a deadly trap, and lands at the forefront of the Texas Hold ’Em craze, which apparently wasn’t confined to the USA.
A crazy villain taps into crazes
Similar to the plot of the excellent 1998 “Millennium” episode “The Mikado,” cop Anna (Stefania Rocca) gets a link to a webcam feed where a woman is bound and gagged. The baddie will free the captive woman if the polizia win two out of three in the attached e-poker game, and kill her if he wins.
“The Card Player” (2003)
Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Stars: Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino
The background cops in “The Card Player” are worthless, so it’s rather appropriate that Argento originally conceived this as a sequel to “The Stendhal Syndrome,” a decent film except for the cop who is insanely bad at her job. (Asia Argento doesn’t return, but her sister, Fiore, plays a captive. And Anna Manni becomes Anna Mari.)
The police chief seems to be good for nothing, but luckily a Liam Neeson soundalike (Liam Cunningham’s John, exiled to the Irish embassy in Rome) partners with Anna (Stefania Rocca) and does actual detective work, such as examining the corpses – always dumped in a river – for forensic clues. No Rome officials have this skill, for some reason.
The duo stumbles across a teenage e-poker prodigy, Remo (Silvio Muccino), and deputizes him to take on The Card Player – Italy’s tax dollars at work — and the game sequences are embarrassingly thrilling. We see the face of the victim and hear her desperate, fear-laden groans as the cards flip over. Poker is a simple enough game that newbies will pick up the rules fast, especially when combined with a bit of dialog about which hands are better than others.
For better or worse, “The Card Player” could be seen as Argento’s experiment in how little plot is necessary to create tension. It’s remarkable that the repeated cycle of poker games — peppered with attempts to trace the internet connection, and John and Anna doing real detecting in slums and overgrowth – do indeed have forward momentum.
You’ll want to play one hand, at least
At the same time, I was always aware of the plot’s thinness, and the film’s over-promising of what’s in store. For instance, The Card Player says he’ll cut off part of the captive for each individual game he wins (in the best-of-three match), but we don’t see that. Granted, severed fingers come into play later, but if you come to Argento films for practical-effects gore, this isn’t a strong entry.
The whodunit is OK inasmuch as I was thinking of a few suspects, especially when John makes a key deduction via analysis of the first video’s sound, a throwback to “Bird with the Crystal Plumage.” That having been said, the reveal of the killer is mundane, the motive bland and the final showdown nonsensical. Yet you’ll want to know how it turns out.
While Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti is back with a score, it’s one of his least interesting, tapping into trendy but annoying electronica. Anna even shoots a stereo playing the music. She’s on target there, but the film misfires by not saying anything deep about the 2003 poker craze, internet-based addictions or even mental illness in a broad sense. Being so dialed into contemporary trends, it’s weird how the film is lazy about commenting on them.
Still, there’s something about the director’s vibe where even his bad stuff is kinda good, and the three leads are easy to root for; decent acting overcomes even the silly dubbing. For all its flaws, “The Card Player” is worth at least one hand.