Movie Review - Tazza: The Hidden Card

I had never heard of Tazza: The Hidden Card until it came up on my Netflix recommendations – presumably because of how many times I have watched the John Malkovich scenes in Rounders. I’m still not completely sure I trust Netflix recommendations after watching it.

Tazza: The Hidden Card follows 2006’s Tazza: The High Rollers, but is pretty much a stand alone film centering around the nephew of one of The High Rollers. Rapper Seung-hyun Choi moves from music to acting and does a good job as a charismatic leading man, playing a young hustler (or ‘tazza’ in Korean) who gets drawn into bigger and dodgier games where skill matters far less than the con and the stakes are literally life and death.

The overall tone is best described as Guy Ritchie directs a K-pop remake of Shade. It has the rise and fall plot of much great cinema and definitely crams enough characters, cards and double crosses into its two and half hour run time to feel genuinely epic. Though it does feel every minute of that length, I could probably have gone for something a little tighter.

That said, it is a technically accomplished work. It may be a case of style over substance but – blimey, Charlie – what style. The whole thing zips and dashes from plot point A to fancy location to music video montage to action sequence to plot points B, C, D and Q at a fairly breakneck speed. The outfits and apartments are all on trend and shot to squeeze the maximum glamour out of everyone of the good looking boys and girls the director has piled up in front of the camera.

What little substance there is, is pretty well pieced together. Despite the labyrinthine network of character arcs and plot-twists the film never gets lost in the maze. You know what everyone wants and what they have to do to get it, and when it all comes together in the end it is pretty satisfying, if somewhat predictable.

One thing that grates is that as a foreigner I have never played Go-Stop, or Godori, and it is the only game they play in Tazza:The Hidden Card. There is no handy intro to the rules so I was broadly lost as to the rules of the game. This isn’t a disaster since the scenes are directed in such a way that one is never really lost. However, I did wish I had done a more thorough research of the game on Wikipedia before watching. I felt I missed out on some nuances.

And damn, I want a deck of those little hwatu cards they play with.