Rounders 1998
Not a bad movie, but not a great one either. I was watching Hoosiers last night before going to see this and thinking that I had remembered it as being a pretty good movie for a basketball flick. But watching it last night, all I saw were interminable blips of basketball games as they progressed up through the playoffs. Rounders does pretty much the same for poker except without the coach and there’s only one guy on the team.
Matt Damon plays pretty much the same character as he did in Good Will Hunting only without as many troubling issue as he had in Good Will Hunting (he doesn’t beat the crap out of people for no reason in this one and isn’t an asshole to everyone who cares for him). He plays a poker player with some talent. Among amateurs he has incredible powers of knowing odds and reading people’s faces but he gets cleaned out by a real pro early in the movie so he definitely isn’t the same kind of genius he was in GWH.
I wonder if Damon will be able to play any other kind of character. I thought he was better in GWH, but he was respectable here. It’s just that it’s the same character. In this movie the character doesn’t have the same depth and the movie rolls along fairly predictably.
I don’t want to give away too much about the plot, but if you’ve seen the commercials you already know.
I’ll give it a B-
I’ve decided to go from the 1 to 10 scale Royce likes, to a letter scale. It’s a little less ambiguous (I always struggled with 7 being passing like on a school scale of 1 to 100 or 5 being average like on a true 1 to 10 scale, so I would up never giving anything less than 5) and everyone should treat the scale about the same.