Movie Review - All In: The Poker Movie

All In - The Poker Movie was yet another documentary that set out to do a potted history of the game from its murky origins somewhere down the Mississippi to the aftermath of (spoiler alert) Black Friday. The difference is that All In seemed to have some real funding behind it, going broad and going big.

On the way through the story of poker it covers the obvious nodes of Nick the Greek, Amarillo Slim, Doyle, Stuey and Moneymaker, showing the development of Poker from a game for cheats and scam artists to a game for megastars in late noughties. All In also gives us a peek the road gambling days of the early 20th Century, the underground card rooms of late 20th Century and into the huge entertainment empire that grew out of the WSOP and the internet boom in the 21st.

The story comes to a close in the ironic return to shady roots with the story of the white collar crime that backed Full Tilt. Thanks to the period it was shot over, and presumably for story reasons it somewhat skirts Ultimate Bets’ own troubles with staying clean and as a result includes a beautiful moment in which Phil Hellmuth tells us about his ‘perfect integrity’ while kitted out from cap to sneaker in fully UB branded toggery.

Along the way from the way back when to the almost now, it also goes into some fascinating side alleys, like the story of Henry Orenstein, a Polish Holocaust survivor and one of the creators of the Transformers. He also happens to the owner of the patent for hole cam technology and was directly involved in the development of the WPT – which despite being the most bland of all the poker shows out there, was also probably the biggest at its peak.

Documentary Troubles

The problem a lot of documentaries run into, is to do with style. The nature of found footage and talking heads is to look televisual. There are plenty documentaries made that do hold up as Full Blown Films (capital F, capital B, capital F again), most of Werner Hertzog’s work for example, but that sort of cinematic scope isn’t available in a lot of subjects a lot of the time.

This documentary definitely, definitely, suffers from that visually, but the scope of the stories told, and the big (and smaller, more interesting) names it has as subjects have a somewhat epic feel to them. I would probably be disappointed to have have paid theater admission fees when this first came out, but now on DVD, especially given the competition it’s a fun watch.

If you’re not familiar with the history of the game the story is compelling enough on its own, and if you are, you probably haven’t heard it told like this. Not that it’s a flashy or innovative documentary, but it knows when to withhold information and what makes for an interesting conflict. In other words it is a solid hour and forty five of storytelling. Breaking no molds, but not getting anything badly wrong either.

It also has an impressively broad selection of interviews. Not just the recognizable poker names, but a ton of behind the scenes people, poker commentators, people involved in the business side of things, who work on the computer programming and TV programs, and people who are Matt Damon.

How’s the Poker?

I always talk about the films I review here in terms of their quality as poker movies, distinct from their relative merits artistically. Here is feels a bit redundant. It’s a documentary, the poker on screen all really happened, more or less.

But I think it is worth saying that I came away feeling it had given a really good sense of what it is like to play poker, at most levels and at different times. Something of how it might have been to sit for fifteen hours in the pall of smoke that would have hung over the WSOP tables in the 70s, or the coke fuelled games of the 80s and nineties, or Mountain Dew fuelled twenty-tabling of 4-max rush on three screens one of which is playing reruns of High Stakes Poker and the World Poker Tour.

So it deserves some points for that. Especially as one of my criticisms of KidPoker was that it told the uninitiated almost nothing about poker.

Coda

So, in short: All In: The Poker Movie is a solid if unremarkable documentary.

It won’t win any prizes, but it’ll keep you amused while it doesn’t do so, and it has got some nice bits of information that I certainly hadn’t come across before – your mileage may differ.

Worth a watch on a slow week.