“THE CARD PLAYER” (2004), DARIO ARGENTO’S “GIALLO” CLASSIC
reviewed by Tom Lavagnino.
COVID has re-calibrated the stature of daily life in so many people’s lives, but huge swaths of culture have resisted change–poker among them. Sure, it was tough to find an in-person game in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, but on-line poker–a staple of every frat boy, flower arranger, boot camp enlistee, and boho barista’s life for years now—-has achieved an ubiquitous prominence, within the scheme of today’s world, that’s positively unassailable.
Poker has been showcased in countless recent motion pictures, too–Paul Schrader’s fascinating THE CARD COUNTER, starring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Hadish, being the most recent example–but Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s 2004 film THE CARD PLAYER might very well have been the first to utilize internet poker as the lynchpin of its I’ll-murder-all-my-kidnapping-victims-if-you-cops-can’t-beat-me-playing-five-card-draw plot.
Argento is probably best known for the spectacularly baroque 1977 film SUSPIRIA, and his reputation for galvanizing movie audiences-—at the occasional expense of logic, narrative coherence, and character motivation—-isn’t sullied in the least by this classically-structured, well-worth-seeing giallo thriller. Set in contemporary Rome, THE CARD PLAYER is the sort of movie where the obligatory love scene–between visiting Irish Detective John (Liam Cunningham, aka “Davos Seaworth” in GAME OF THRONES) and Italian police investigator Anna (Stefania Rocca, channeling CARRIE-era Amy Irving)–culminates with the two spooning in bed, followed immediately by a shot of their handguns, on the adjacent nightstand, positioned in an identical spooning position.
Despite the presence of those affectionate pistols, THE CARD PLAYER is a giallo through and through. For those unfamiliar with this vaguely-cultish, proto-European movie genre, giallos were made popular in the mid-1960’s by legendary Italian director Mario Bava (and, to a lesser degree, Alfred Hitchcock), but truly came into their own with the advent of Argento’s career a decade later. Hallmarks of giallo cinema are attacks via knives, spears, and other implements–rather than firearms—-and visually operatic sequences of beautiful women being fatally stabbed, choked, or drowned by a psychotic assailant whose identity is never revealed until the final reel; every giallo climax involves the killer “accidentally” perishing in some variation of the classic hoisted-by-his-own-petard paradigm.
The modern twist of THE CARD PLAYER is that the killer streams “live” images of his victim-to-be’s face (on one half of an internet screen) while simultaneously challenging the police to compete, mano-et-mano, in hand after hand of five-card-draw on-line poker (on the other half). If the authorities can win three hands, the victim is released unharmed. But if the killer emerges victorious, the victim will be summarily killed.
Misogynistic? Sure. Grotesque? Absolutely. Giallo? You’d better believe it, baby.
As it happens, Anna isn’t particularly skilled at poker (despite the fact that her father was a lifelong player; he committed suicide when he lost all his money playing cards), and John’s so clueless, he doesn’t know that a flush beats a straight. The cops proceed to lose the initial round miserably, and–in a chilling sequence that’s all the more effective for being suggestive rather than gory-—the first gorgeous, punishingly desirable, thoroughly innocent female victim is summarily murdered by the mysterious psychopath.
Killer: 1, Police: 0.
Enter youthful Remo (Silvio Muccino, star of Roman Coppola’s nutso 2001 film CQ)–a live-wire five-card-draw expert who’s spent every waking hour at the local video arcade perfecting his card-playing technique. Pressed into service by Anna, John, and the Rome police department, Remo valiantly takes the poker chair, faces off against the killer and his new victim (in a fresh round of internet card-playing)–and promptly loses his shirt. And the second victim’s life.
Killer: 2, Police: 0.
But when Lucia, the police chief’s luscious daughter, gets kidnapped by the psycho, Remo gets a chance to redeem himself. In the opening round of dealing, Remo’s three Jacks beat the killer’s pair of aces, round two sees Remo’s pair-of-sixes-with-a-joker defeat the killer’s pair of eights (one more win to go!), and the tense finale finds Remo successfully drawing a straight to the killer’s bad-beat trip kings.
Killer: 2, Police: 1! Lucia is released unharmed!
But Remo is subsequently offed by the killer (in a spectacularly gruesome night-time set-piece on the Tiber), and John the Irishman, hot on the murderer’s trail (or a how-to book on poker, it’s hard to say which), is killed, too (in a bloody sequence recalling nothing if not an E.C. Comics panel); it’s up to Anna, our plucky heroine, to follow up on John’s lead, ID the killer, and confront him once and for all.
This she does. However, in a climax more attuned to a Samuel Beckett play than that of a contemporary motion picture, Anna finds herself playing five-card-draw video poker against the killer on a handy laptop (with, one assumes, good local wi-fi) while both are simultaneously handcuffed to parallel train tracks–and with the 8:25 to Milan headed right their way.
A ridiculous conclusion to a wild ride of a movie? Short answer: Yes. (Indeed, if the sequence is difficult to picture in one’s mind, it’s even more difficult to describe with a straight face).
Which is not to suggest that THE CARD PLAYER isn’t an entertaining experience worth sussing out via your friendly neighborhood streaming service. It’s certainly an entertaining ride. Aggressively so. But the movie is also sloppily constructed, dramatically over-attenuated, and bereft of anything other than the most superficial of poker knowledge.
It’s this latter criticism that’s the most vexing. For while poker ability is certainly applicable, to a minor degree, when it comes to the playing of video poker, the one-draw nature of the game showcased in THE CARD PLAYER precludes the utilization of card-counting, bluffing, or pot strategies—-skills which would separate a Phil Ivey from a John The Poker-Challenged Irish Detective Who Visited Rome And Ultimately Got Himself Skewered.
But for a textbook example of 21st-century giallo, THE CARD PLAYER is a hoot. Park your poker brain at the door, sit back, and enjoy this 2004 chapter of Dario Argento’s wondrously wild, hyperkinetically entertaining, endlessly bloody career.
– Tom Lavagnino is a playwright, television producer and golfer (18 handicap) living in Southern California. www.tomlavagnino.com
