Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Poker Night Blu-ray Movie Review

Know When to Fold 'Em

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 11, 2015

Everything wrong with contemporary thrillers/serial killer/horror films can be found in the 105-minute running time of Poker Night, a smorgasbord of genre cliches from writer/director Greg Francis, whose experience in reality TV appears to have deprived him of any connection to reality. The jaded cops whose poker game keeps interrupting the gleeful sadism of the film's chief villain joke that they spend 97% of their time dealing with the 3% of humanity that commits crime, but zero percent of humanity inhabits the movie. Francis trades in cardboard cutouts so thin that even actors as good as Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito, Titus Welliver and Ron Eldard can't breathe life into them. As for the "hero" played by Beau Mirchoff of the MTV series Awkward., he bleeds stage blood well enough, but never for an instant is he convincing as a cop, rookie or otherwise. Without a believable morally conflicted hero at its center, Poker Night has nothing to hold it together.

But Francis doesn't especially care about holding a story together. He's an ADD-addled product of the twists-and-turns school of filmmaking, where every story beat has to bring a new shock, reversal, "reveal" or surprise, no matter how arbitrary. When in doubt, flash back or flash forward, bring out the digital toolbox to change the visuals, or drop some previously withheld tidbit of information that undermines everything you've shown the audience up to that point. Genuine suspense requires precision, pacing and, above all, coherent logic, but who cares about such old-fashioned craftsmanship?

The "poker night" of the title is a game played by senior detectives in Warsaw, Indiana, most of whom have been recruited from major urban police departments to help deal with a recent spike in crime. Over cards and drinks, they trade war stories. On this particular night, they are joined by a rookie detective, Stan Jeter (Mirchoff), whose speedy promotion results from a lucky break that led to his cracking a major case. (The details are revealed later in the film.) Jeter is brought to the game by his commanding officer and mentor, Calabrese (Perlman), where all the regulars give him a hard time and tell him that their stories are the most valuable education he can possibly acquire. As they tell their stories, Jeter imagines himself inside the incidents being related by Calabrese, Bernard (Esposito), Cunningham (Eldard), Maxwell (Welliver) and David (Corey Large, who also produced).

Director Francis keeps cutting back to the poker table for new stories, but the poker game is mostly a gimmick. The detectives' tales allow him to cram in more mayhem and depravity, but they're sideshows, a disguise for the film's real plot, which begins after Jeter leaves the game and is kidnapped by a psycho in a mask who holds him captive in a basement, alternately drugging and torturing him. The masked fiend has also kidnapped an underage girl named Amy (Halston Sage), whom Jeter knows from one of his cases and with whom he has a relationship that can best be described as questionable. One of the torments the villain inflicts on Jeter is to let him listen while he rapes Amy in the next room. As the villain explains to Jeter, he used to be a normal guy—there are scenes of him leading a "normal" life, while still wearing his mask, which is Poker Night's idea of humor—but now he's evolved beyond such constraints. He's boiled his code of conduct down to two simple rules, of which the first is to have sex with young girls and the second is to kill anyone who interferes with rule 1. In Poker Night, this is what passes for motivation. (Where is Dexter when we need him?)

The film's central action involves Jeter's increasingly desperate attempts to rescue Amy and escape, all of which turn out to be lures prepared by the bad guy to give the hero false hope. Of course, there's an underlying motive for all of this, far-fetched though it may be, and the villain has a long-term game plan that eventually plays itself out—but not until Francis has indulged in plenty of nasty stuff involving torture, murder and violation of body parts both living and dead, all of which is supposed to be horrifying but is mostly just offensive (in the sense that someone thought this kind of lazy depravity would pass for entertainment). Periodically, the story cuts back to the poker game to maintain the pretext that Jeter's "training" at the hands of these mentors will somehow prove useful to him, but the effect is to drain from both story lines whatever tension either one had (and neither one had much).

As a final abuse of his audience, director Francis piles several "surprise" endings on top of each other, adding yet another ten minutes to material that has already been stretched far beyond any conceivable interest. Still, there's a kind of logic in having multiple endings for an amorphous creation like Poker Night. If your story lacks a beginning and middle, how can you know when you've finished? Maybe even more endings were left on the cutting room floor. For once, it's a good thing that no deleted scenes were included.

Poker Night Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Poker Night was captured on the Arri Alexa by Brandon Cox (who shot the 2009 film entitled The Collector). About the only thing that XLrator Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has going for it is the clarity of the digitally acquired image, which was presumably sourced directly from the digital intermediate with no intervening analog conversion. Clarity and sharpness are good, detail is plentiful, blacks are deep (an essential quality for a film where so much takes place in dark interiors), and colors range from naturalistic to the various artificial palettes that the director shuffles in and out of the story to maintain visual variety in place of a coherent plot. The villain's past and some of Jeter's memories get a lurid and oversaturated palette; other Jeter memories and some of the cops' stories are desaturated; and a few stray sequences are black-and-white. If there was a meaningful pattern to the palette changes, it escaped me.

With no real extras, XLrator has devoted the whole of the BD-25 to the 105-minute film, yielding an average bitrate of 22.50 Mbps, which is sufficient to reproduce this digital project without visible artifacts.

Poker Night Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There's nothing either subtle or especially memorable about Poker Night's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA. It has all the requisite sounds of gunfire, police sirens, body blows of various sorts, bones cracking, skin tearing (Crazy Glue plays a major part), blood spraying and other audible indications of pain and injury. (In the real world, Jeter would be dead or permanently disabled long before the film ended.) The dialogue is clear and correctly distinguished from Jeter's voiceover narration. The generic thriller score is by Scott Glasgow (National Lampoon's The Legend of Awesomest Maximus).

Poker Night Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 2.39:1; 1:41). At startup, the disc also plays trailers for Housebound, The Mule and Ironclad: Battle for Blood, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Poker Night Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Blu-ray of Poker Night is technically proficient, but the film itself has not one thing to recommend it. Avoid at all costs.