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November 28th 2006
Poker Film Review: Casino Royale
Casino Royale, the latest James Bond movie, has hit the UK cinema screens, and after her majesty the Queen, along with a few other celebs, had caught the premiere screening the rest of us “normal folk” got our turn. And we loved it.
Now as you know this is not a film review website, so besides verifying that yes, this really is one of the best Bond films there has ever been, I’ll just get straight to the point: the poker. The poker in Casino Royale, praise be the lord, is more than just a time wasting exercise before Bond gets back to the 9 to 5 business of preventing nuclear war and bedding other people’s wives. After all, the film is called “Casino Royale”.
No, the poker in this movie is essential to the plot. In a nutshell Bond must win a (very) high stakes poker game or else,….., well, I don’t want to give it away now do I? Let’s just say that if Bond loses it’s bad for MI6 and world peace, and if Bond wins it’s bad for baddies and terrorists and evil plans for world domination.
On the whole the poker is ok. Its strong point is that it is well acted, with the players behaving as you would expect poker playing multi-millionaires to behave. There are a few problems however. First of all there are no professional poker players at the table, at least not as far as we are led to beleive. Wouldn’t you think that in a poker game with $150 million up for grabs someone would have staked the likes of a Phil Ivey to have a shot?
Still, that said, maybe the evil baddies hosting the game sensibly decided it wouldn’t be in their best interests to have the best player in the world at their game! So we can let that go. But then we move on to major problem, and it’s the same one that has marred every poker scene in every film or television program since the dawn of man.
Why is it that no director alive seems able to resist the temptation to make every single featured poker hand one in which the competing players all have bloody monsters!? It drives me nuts. You’ll see what I mean when you watch the final hand of Casino Royale, though that hand is just one of many laughably improbable scenarios. Think “The Cincinnati Kid” but even more absurd. Full house, versus straight, versus flush, versus four of a kind versus straight flush; that kind of thing!
For the love of poker, what’s wrong with someone calling a bet with a draw? Is there a law against someone getting lucky? And there must be a good reason why we never see players going all-in before the river, but I still don’t know what it is.
There is, fortunately, at least one nice play when Bond deliberately plays a losing hand in order to get a read on his opponent, but there should have been more play like this. After all, either you get poker or you don’t, and if you don’t get it is doesn’t matter if it’s four of a kind or a double belly buster draw, its all nonsense. I spoke to a female friend of mine after watching the film and she verified my suspicion that for her the entire poker scene was like watching a Japanese quiz show. So lets have a few real quality poker hands in there for those of us that care, after all, it wont make a blind bit of difference to the poker illiterate.
Overall the poker scenes held their own, but the die hard poker fan will be disappointed. On the other hand, the die hard Bond fan will be over the moon.
Submitted: 28/11/2006 12:35:18
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