Title: The Card Player (2004) Director: Dario Argento Cast: Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Claudio Santamaria, Sylvio Muccino Review: I was excited when a friend told me he'd been able to get his hands on a copy of Argentos latest film The Card Player. All I have seen as of late are his classics from his early years and I was eager to see if the master of Italian Giallos still had it in him to deliver a tense and entertaining film.
The Card Player is about a serial killer who catches his lady victims and later connects through the internet with the police department making them an offer. Either you play poker with him and win 3 out of 5 games or he kills the victim. A female detective by the name of Anna is the one who is contacted by the killer so she takes it upon herself to find a young kid who's an expert at playing poker so he can play against the killer...and maybe save the victims lives.
Watching this film I instantly noticed a few things about it. Number one, it was missing a few things that make an Argento flick and Argento flick. Namely, this movie was missing some of Argentos visual flare. His flashy camera moves and colors are gone. Too me this movie was devoid of what I loved the most about Argentos films: the color! This flick was totally colorless! And its not like in Opera where the movie purposely had sort of like a greyish almost black and white look to it...here some scenes just seem so devoid of life that I didn't feel like I was watching an Argento movie. I don't expect him to make every film look like Suspiria or Deep Red, but it just felt like that to me. Lifeless in look.
Another thing. Where were Argentos cool camera shots? Nowhere to be seen! Opera had em, Deep Red had em...even Two Evil Eyes had them. But the Card Player had non of Argentos cool camera angles that I've come to love! Bummer.
But lets move on to the positive side. We loose some (not all) of Argentos style but we gain in the "lets make this a cohesive and understandable film" department. Yes my friends, heres an Argento film that is actually cohesive and pretty easy to follow. At the same time it felt kind of weird cause I had actually gotten used to trying to figure out Argentos films like a puzzle...yet this one was strangely easy to follow. He obviously focused a whole lot more on developing and telling the story in a way that the audience could easily understand. It felt strange coming from Argento but I guess it was a welcomed thing. I guess you could see that also from a negative side since some people actually like the fact that Argentos films are not always easy to grasp. I guess you could say that this was one of his most formulaic and commercial films to date.
I enjoyed the characters very much, specially the young kid named Remo. Argento made sure that we get to know these characters well before anything happens. He makes you like em so then he can play with your nerves in those really tense sequences. And I must say that Argento still has the touch of making a tense situation and then turning up the heat and making it even more intense. I'm talking about the scene where the killer is inside of Annas apartment. That scene was pure Argento at play and it reminded me of a scene in Opera where the killer also manages to get into the girls apartment. There's another excellent scene involving a chase scene with Remo. Great stuff there and those scenes reminded me that I was in fact watching an Argento flick.
Gone is the gore and blood. Sorry folks but it appears that in todays modern PC world even Argento has had to bow down to the powers that be and he went and made a film without practically any blood in it. There's some violence and the death sequences are great...but unfortunately bloodless. So be ready for that. I didn't really feel it so much because aside from the fact that the death sequences had little to no blood, Argento still managed to make em suspenseful and tense. He replaced blood with really tight suspense sequences. The scenes where we see the card games on the computer where great because they actually show the face of the victim on the computer screen as we watch the game going on. Nice touch and hearing the victims screams during the poker game was a fantastic choice that made the proceedings all the more tense.
So what we have here is an Argento flick without the usual Argento staples like stylish colors and creative camera angles. Still, without those things we've come to expect from the man, Argento managed to put his stamp on the film in other ways . All in all an entertaining flick that shows us glimpses of who Argento was in his blood drenched glory days but it seems to me like this movie was very restrained, kind of afraid to be what it should have been. Its Argento for a PC world.
Rating: 31/2 out of 5
The Card Player is about a serial killer who catches his lady victims and later connects through the internet with the police department making them an offer. Either you play poker with him and win 3 out of 5 games or he kills the victim. A female detective by the name of Anna is the one who is contacted by the killer so she takes it upon herself to find a young kid who's an expert at playing poker so he can play against the killer...and maybe save the victims lives.
Watching this film I instantly noticed a few things about it. Number one, it was missing a few things that make an Argento flick and Argento flick. Namely, this movie was missing some of Argentos visual flare. His flashy camera moves and colors are gone. Too me this movie was devoid of what I loved the most about Argentos films: the color! This flick was totally colorless! And its not like in Opera where the movie purposely had sort of like a greyish almost black and white look to it...here some scenes just seem so devoid of life that I didn't feel like I was watching an Argento movie. I don't expect him to make every film look like Suspiria or Deep Red, but it just felt like that to me. Lifeless in look.
Another thing. Where were Argentos cool camera shots? Nowhere to be seen! Opera had em, Deep Red had em...even Two Evil Eyes had them. But the Card Player had non of Argentos cool camera angles that I've come to love! Bummer.
But lets move on to the positive side. We loose some (not all) of Argentos style but we gain in the "lets make this a cohesive and understandable film" department. Yes my friends, heres an Argento film that is actually cohesive and pretty easy to follow. At the same time it felt kind of weird cause I had actually gotten used to trying to figure out Argentos films like a puzzle...yet this one was strangely easy to follow. He obviously focused a whole lot more on developing and telling the story in a way that the audience could easily understand. It felt strange coming from Argento but I guess it was a welcomed thing. I guess you could see that also from a negative side since some people actually like the fact that Argentos films are not always easy to grasp. I guess you could say that this was one of his most formulaic and commercial films to date.
I enjoyed the characters very much, specially the young kid named Remo. Argento made sure that we get to know these characters well before anything happens. He makes you like em so then he can play with your nerves in those really tense sequences. And I must say that Argento still has the touch of making a tense situation and then turning up the heat and making it even more intense. I'm talking about the scene where the killer is inside of Annas apartment. That scene was pure Argento at play and it reminded me of a scene in Opera where the killer also manages to get into the girls apartment. There's another excellent scene involving a chase scene with Remo. Great stuff there and those scenes reminded me that I was in fact watching an Argento flick.
Gone is the gore and blood. Sorry folks but it appears that in todays modern PC world even Argento has had to bow down to the powers that be and he went and made a film without practically any blood in it. There's some violence and the death sequences are great...but unfortunately bloodless. So be ready for that. I didn't really feel it so much because aside from the fact that the death sequences had little to no blood, Argento still managed to make em suspenseful and tense. He replaced blood with really tight suspense sequences. The scenes where we see the card games on the computer where great because they actually show the face of the victim on the computer screen as we watch the game going on. Nice touch and hearing the victims screams during the poker game was a fantastic choice that made the proceedings all the more tense.
So what we have here is an Argento flick without the usual Argento staples like stylish colors and creative camera angles. Still, without those things we've come to expect from the man, Argento managed to put his stamp on the film in other ways . All in all an entertaining flick that shows us glimpses of who Argento was in his blood drenched glory days but it seems to me like this movie was very restrained, kind of afraid to be what it should have been. Its Argento for a PC world.
Rating: 31/2 out of 5