Movie Review: Deal

On good days, the job of a movie reviewer is to advocate for a great or work of art or entertainment. On bad days, the job is to watch terrible movies so that the rest of you don’t have to. On the very worst days the job is dissect the corpses of films and leave them strung up on the road into town as a warning to other films #firstworldproblems.

On an unrelated note, I recently rewatched Deal, the now forgotten rehash of Martin Scorsese's pool room masterpiece The Colour of Money. The cast is some human beings plus Burt Reynolds who is cast as himself but much more bored. The plot centres around Bored Burt Reynolds – an old school poker player who quit the game – and the story of how he meets and mentors an up and coming young poker player called Alex Stillman, played by Bret Harrison, who appears to be one of those weird Japanese robots that could almost pass for human. Unfortunately, this cardboard cutout of a Ken Doll does not even come with a costume to suggest what his personality is meant to be.

Bored Burt and the Ken Doll form a mentor/mentee dyad and table shenanigans ensue. Stuff happens, some of it good (money made), some of it bad (loves lost), and then the movie ends. If it starts again, you have died and this is what hell looks, like dreary, tired ,and tiring. Whatever you did, you probably don’t deserve it.

The team behind it don’t inspire confidence either. Going by his IMDb page, the film appears to have killed the writing career of Marc Weinstock, while director and co-writer Gil Cates Jr. seems to have come from mediocrity, delivered mediocrity, and gone on to mediocrity. Only one of his directorial credits has a rating over 6.0 on the IMDb as of the time of writing.

So the professional team are not raising anyone’s expectations, nor is the fact that the whole film is set in and around the WPT, the WSOP’s less cool brother. Presumably because Lucky You beat the filmmakers to a deal (yuck-yuck) on that one.

So what did I think of this movie? Spoiler alert: I did not like it, Sam I am.

How The Mighty Have Fallen

The dialogue is horrible. In the first act, characters are constantly tell each things like ‘Remember I told you blah,’ or ‘You know this thing about yourself.’ Bret Harrison has two painful scenes in which he is oh so hilariously inept with women. But just in case you walked in half an hour late, we still get a scene in which Bret Harrison announces that he is ‘not exactly good with women’ for the cheap seats.

If at that point you are already wondering why this poker movie is suddenly evoking American Pie, you then have the comparison underlined by the appearance of Shannon Elizabeth on the screen as part of a somewhat creepy subplot in which Old Man Reynolds begins to sexually mentor Alex by hiring a hooker to sleep with him. That reveal about her being a hooker would be a spoiler if I – or you – gave the slightest shit about what is going on in the movie by the time that plot kicks in.

There is even a bizarre scene inserted into the film where a character – who we’ve only really seen once before as window dressing – shows up to tell the Bored Burt Reynold’s wife everything the audience needs to know about what drives the Bored Burt Reynolds character. The result of this conversation is that the sensible woman who has seen her husband go broke gambling has been lied to by that same husband about his poker. The lesson we learn from the film is that wives in that situation should just support their husbands when they want to win at playing cards – but only if they want to win at playing cards really hard.

There is a sort of logic to the sequence that you could call a plot if it weren’t really driven by a preposterous series of character reactions which leave you utterly bemused as to what sort of people these are meant to be.

Then there’s a slew of montages which are, without fail, badly put together. Abstract cuts of random players faces, almost all shot against a blue background and with no sense of how they relate to the equally random shots of cards and chips. You never know who is winning or losing. Or care.

There were brief moments where interesting ideas were put forward as if to tease some sort of film that could have been. There was the barest hint of a conflict between an old fashioned people-based poker, and the new school of maths driven poker. There’s a movie in that.

Burt Reynolds should be better than this, if I ever see Bret Harrison in anything ever again, I’m sure he too will turn out to be better than this. The last and best hope for everyone involved is the fact that this film has taken its 3% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and so comprehensively disappeared that I found it hard to dig up even my own copy of the DVD.

The Casino Experience

If you were hoping that at least, with the involvement of several pros and the WPT, the poker would be decent, then you just haven’t been paying close enough attention. Everything about this film is a less good version of something else. Even the horrible poker.

To take just the most egregious examples, the opening scene is as near an exact copy of Le Chiffre’s first poker scene in Casino Royale. They want us to know the character is a mathematical player so they have him shove a hand then tell his opponent that they’re an 86% underdog and should fold.

Filmmakers everywhere, listen up. Fact 1: memorising the percentage for hitting an inside straight does not make you a good player. It doesn’t even make you a mathematical player. It definitely doesn’t suggest that you are ‘good with numbers’. Fact 2: Telling your opponent in no uncertain terms that you know what their hand is and have them crushed after you shove into them, is just plain terrible. It was bad when Le Chiffre did it, it’s even worse in this movie because, not only is Bret Harrison not Mads Mikkelsen, but his opponent goes on to call him like a mug and then yell, ‘Every Damn time.’ Which means this guy has made this mistake of not understanding very basic probability, over and over.

Spoiler’s Over. For Lucky You At Least

When not serving up a plate of copy pasta, the movie does slip into cliche around the card table. The movie recycles the tropes whereby tells are super specific and super obvious allowing ‘great’ poker players to read hands going on at every table in a room even when there are clearly physical objects between them and the board and players.

The movie also puts great big Everests of chips in front of the tournament players right from the start, like they get their whole 25k starting stack entirely in five dollar chips to make tipping easier.

In another scene the Boring Kids tell Bored Burt that he ‘knows his tell’. This is emphasised later when the Boring raises the Bored heads up. They both have junk, but when Reynolds throws his junk hand away pre-flop, the movie acts like the kid just invented bluffing for the first time.

Which isn’t to say it is above making it’s own stupid mistakes too. There are a slew of idiotic poker moments right from the pre-credit sequence in which Jennifer Tilly says, ‘Looks like I scared everyone out,’ after getting two preflop callers at a six handed table. The WPT is broadcast live on TV in this world, and is a series in which not only is it super standard for two final tables to have five of the same players a few months apart, but that two of those players are the bromantic duo of Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari. It’s hard not to feel that the WPT must be rigged in some way.

There is even a scene where Bored Burt Reynolds’s wife player asks him, ‘but how much did you lose?’

Some reality is injected by the poker cameos, including a three second clip of James Woods laughing in a casino somewhere. (Who knows if he was paid for that or, more likely, if they just used some documentary footage under some sort of fair use act.)

This is also a world in which the WPT $25k championship event apparently attracts enough players to have $8m up top with a $50m prize pool. Yes, in this world 2,000 players put up $25k to play in a WPT event. According to Wikipedia, the largest WPT ever was the 2007 championship event (presumably the event superseded by this fictional version in the Deal timeline). That event had just over $15m in the prize pool. I don’t want to be a dick to the WPT but, $50m: that’s WSOP money, bro. Know your limitations.

The Final Word

There is a moment at the final table where Vince Van Patten, as if setting the whole enterprise up for a fall, tells the camera, “This is gonna make a great story.” Turns out he was wrong. The film is utterly without personality, it is a void, nothing living, or sustaining can grow there. I was bored almost unto anger. Almost.

I can only really recommend it as an especially insulting gift for your worst enemies. They won’t watch it, but it’s the thought that counts.