Secretly Great Movies: Rounders.

The story you know:

Matt Damon, fresh off Good Will Hunting, teams with an up-and-coming Edward Norton (Rounders came out a month before American History X) for a largely overlooked little movie about the cutthroat world of high-stakes poker, which got mixed reviews and failed to make a huge splash at the box office. At the time of its release, most viewers had probably never heard of the game that the whole movie is built around: a quaint variation of poker called "Texas Hold 'Em."

The shocking truth:

Obviously, times have changed. Rounders has aged extremely well, which is what usually happens when you  successfully predict the future. Since it left the multiplex, Hold 'Em has lassoed the public imagination thanks to increased TV coverage of tournaments, the growing popularity of online poker, scintillating depictions in books like James McManus' Positively Fifth Street, and movies like, well, Rounders. By 2006, Hold 'Em was so popular that it became James Bond's game of choice in the series reboot Casino Royale (as opposed to the much more passé Baccarat, the high-stakes game that Bond plays in the novel).

Texas Hold 'Em now saturates the media landscape, but Rounders has a crackling, card table authenticity that still resonates. The film is littered with sharp, card-savvy dialogue, peppered with quotes from poker legends like Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim--and it even features a guest appearance by World Series of Poker champion Johnny Chan.

Orange sold separately. 

But Rounders would be a great movie even if it was about crossword puzzles or Boggle. It features the kind of cast you rarely see assembled outside of superhero movies: in addition to Damon and Norton, you get John Turturro, Famke Janssen, Gretchen Mol, John Malkovich, and Martin Landau (here playing a sage jurist and looking more than ever like political philosopher John Rawls). Ebert, in his review, claimed that Rounders (which is directed by noir revivalist John Dahl) is less a noir than a sports picture, but he's just slightly off the mark: it's a western.

Rounders is basically Unforgiven with cards instead of guns, featuring a main character in denial about his innate talent for killing people winning huge pots, who in the end accepts his destiny just in time for a climactic showdown. But Damon's character here is a genuine white hat, coming across like an agreeably toned-down version of Will Hunting: instead of a prickly, supergenius janitor, he's an eminently likable working stiff with a natural gift for fleecing suckers. And Norton gives one of his best performances as the Lando Calrissian to Damon's Han Solo.

For some critics, the film's weak link is Malkovich, as the scenery-chomping Russian mobster KGB. As Peter Travers puts it, "Malkovich soars so far over the top, he's passing Pluto." But the actual history of high-stakes poker is littered with such eccentrics, and given that he displays the kind of sly cunning usually associated with survival in the darkest corners of the Soviet Union (as well as table success), isn't it possible that the KGB we see is actually something of a put-on by the character himself, designed to catch his opponents off-guard and trick them into making a mistake? Stranger things have happened. (And besides, lines like "Lays down a monster...the fuck did you lay that down?!" practically demand Malkovich's chewy delivery.) By way of contrast, Turturro here is a model of restraint, perfectly deadpanning one of the best lines in the movie during a meeting with Damon: "Long time, Knish. How are you?" "The same."

"Pey dis myan hyis mahney."

I've often argued that Rounders is the rare movie that actually cries out for a sequel, which would more or less write itself. We catch up with Mikey years later, now an internationally renowned WSOP champion, beloved for his balance of no-nonsense humility and at-the-table ruthlessness. He's preparing to compete with a cocky, hotshot favorite (choose your own actor)--when all of a sudden Worm turns up to ask for Mikey's help, and time is running out...Miramax, get in touch for a full treatment.