6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
When you become a detective in Warsaw, Indiana, you go to Poker Night, where you play against some of the best cops in the business, who tell you stories about their time on the job. After new Detective Stan Jeter leaves the game, he is caught by a vicious psychopath and locked in a basement, where he must match wits against his captor.
Starring: Beau Mirchoff, Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito, Titus Welliver, Ron EldardThriller | 100% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
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?
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.
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).
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.
The Blu-ray of Poker Night is technically proficient, but the film itself has not one thing to recommend it. Avoid at all costs.
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