| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Rather weak film about a usually successful gambler who exploits winning streaks and avoids losing ones. Yet, his life is a hand to mouth existence evading debtors and violent loan sharks and his looking to lose mentality.
It is also a comedy but the jokes fall a little flat because the Laurel and Hardy type pairing on offer here have little actual chemistry and the latter love story suffers from the same lack of emotional credibility.
The movie is too long for its rather thin premise. The film is filmed in master shots that are unable, because of the distance of the camera from the actors, to evoke intimacy – either between the characters or between the film and its audience. Thus, the characters never come alive because the actors are not really allowed to shine. The running jokes fall somewhat flat because they lack dramatic resonance.
The only aspect of this movie resembling a theme is that by equating gambling to being unpatriotic, leaving everything to fate rather than deliberate choice, is equated to the immorality of not taking personal responsibility for ones own actions. However, the film itself falls into this trap by cobbling a script together from newspaper headlines rather than relying on any genuinely imaginative faculty of the screenwriters.
This is little more than a sequence of stylistic tropes that never amount to much more than mere rhetorical flourishes in a movie that lacks a story, suspense and, indeed, a point.
