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Card Player, The |
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The police are
forced to play poker with life
as stake. A serial killer is killing girls and
for the police to be able to save these girls
lives they have to play online poker with the killer.
When Anna gets to meet the killer face to face
the game gets more intense. It seems as if the
police will never find this killer and the
pressure is now on Anna as she seems to be the
killer's main goal.
The internet is full of negative reviews for this film
and I think that I've read them all so I was not
very positive about watching it. Finally I took the
bull by its horns and did it anyway. The Card Player
doesn't spend any time on dragging out the story,
from scene one we get to see how the killer is playing
with the police. I was thrilled by the movie's plot
already. Because even if the movie isn't that great
this is one cool story. Well, actually the first hour
of the movie is pretty neat but in the last half an
hour it goes down-hill faster than a crazy man in a
wheelchair. The ending was probably one of the stupidest
endings that I have ever seen.
Dario Argento might not be one of my favourite directors
and The Card Player made me realize why. In a couple of
scenes he manages to build up a great creepy atmosphere
where you're just sitting waiting to scream any second,
but you never do. Why create such intense scenes where
the purpose seems to be scaring the viewer and then just
fade out into day? Now to the acting, which I can only
assume is good,. It's hard to decide whether someone is
a good actor/actress or not when they have the most
annoying foreign accent ever. The character developments
are pretty stupid and cliché which made the film even
less impressing.
It's such a shame when good stories go bad and this
is just what's happened here. The Card Player has all
the potential in the world to be scary, original,
evil and even excellent but it never seems to use that
potential. People refer to this movie as a giallo
but I think it's pretty clear that this is not. Hallmark
TV-thriller is a better word for it. Don't get me wrong
here, The Card Player is a pretty entertaining movie
but it could have been so much more. I still recommend
that you check it out. I love it when the killer
is one step ahead of the police and it was a whole lot
better than I thought that it would be.
A couple of disgustingly ugly corpses with slit throats,
a couple of chopped off fingers and a guy gets three
nails through the stomach. From Argento I would have
expected more. We didn't even get any T&A.
For most of the part the soundtrack is pretty cool.
The music played in the poker room is also pretty
damn disturbing but as I said, the climax brings
everything down a notch. See, in the climax they've
decided to play terribly bad techno music. I mean,
what was that all about?
This is not Argento's best movie ever but I thought
that it was kind of entertaining. The story is weak,
predictable and filled with plot holes but that
still doesn't make this a less entertaining movie,
the ending takes care of that. Check it out if you
have nothing better to see but I didn't get any
real pleasure out of watching this and I'm having
it hard to find that anyone else will either.
Review By: AnthroFred
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