7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.4 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.1 |
Mike is a law student who has once been burned playing poker, and has turned his back on gambling in order to settle in with his girlfriend Jo, and his studies. When his former partner in crime Worm is released from prison, though, he is tempted back to the card tables and realises how much he enjoys the thrill of gambling. Jo leaves him, and he goes on a poker spree with Worm, in an attempt to recoup a debt that Worm has carried over from before prison. The men to whom Worm owes the money get heavy, and Mike is forced into a showdown with Teddy KGB, the hood to whom he lost his life savings a year before.
Starring: Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Turturro, Gretchen Mol, Famke JanssenCrime | 100% |
Drama | 26% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English, English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
If The Hustler begat The Cincinnati Kid, did The Cincinnati Kid begat Rounders? Many people (including me in my review of The Cincinnati Kid) have remarked on the basic similarity between the McQueen and Newman films, despite obvious differences. Both films posited up and comers in activities—pool in The Hustler and poker playing in The Cincinnati Kid—rife with subterfuge and backstabbing, and both featured epochal “battles” (for want of a better term) between the young turks and older, much more experienced masters. In the case of The Hustler, it was Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie against Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats, the best pool player on the planet. In The Cincinnati Kid, it was Steve McQueen’s The Kid attempting to out bluff Edward G. Robinson’s The Man. Both films had decidedly different tones and even endings (though at least part of The Cincinnati Kid’s ending was imposed by the studio over director Norman Jewison’s objections), and so the comparison can only go so far. But Rounders picks up the poker gauntlet rather squarely from The Cincinnati Kid, upping the ante (no pun intended) by having two young guys on the make, with one (you guessed it) taking on a Big Kahuna in the underground poker world of New York City in an epochal battle that may actually literally be life and death. Rounders, unlike either The Hustler or The Cincinnati Kid, has a sort of carefree, devil may care ambience about it. It’s not exactly played for laughs, but there’s a lightness to the film that is tonally quite apart from the two early 1960’s films, and which helps some of the ludicrous developments of the Matt Damon-Edward Norton starrer to go down at least a little more easily.
Rounders arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. I frankly haven't seen the previous Alliance release and so can't offer thoughts on how this stacks up, though if that Alliance release is like many other Alliance offerings, my hunch is this new Lionsgate release is hands down the better offering. This Blu-ray offers really remarkable clarity and sharpness, with nicely saturated colors and solid black levels which help to make the nighttime scenes and darker interior segments revealing some surprising amounts of shadow detail. Fine detail overall is exceptional, from the scraggly strands of Malkovich's beard, to the ornate Rococo furnishings of some of the casinos. Some extremely minor aliasing crops up on things like a chain link fence early in the film, but artifacting is minimal and negligible.
Rounders' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track may seem like a bit of overkill for a movie like this which is dependent on smaller dialogue beats as well as sit down activities like poker playing, and yet there's a nice amount of surround activity here, albeit rather subtly at times. New York locations offer a wealth of ambient environmental sounds dotting the soundfield, but even in the poker sequences, there's some very smart attention paid to directionality in terms of everything from dialogue to the snap of cards being placed on the table, or the clipped sounds of plastic chips being stacked. Crowd scenes offer a bit more sonic activity, as might be expected. Fidelity is excellent, with all dialogue being presented crisply and cleanly (though Malkovich is all but incomprehensible a lot of the time). Aside from one or two bombastic sequences, there's no real dynamic range to speak of, but the overall mix is very artfully handled.
Rounders died a pretty quick death during its theatrical exhibition, but like so many films in the home video age, it's been acclaimed as a modern masterpiece by a coterie of fans who have helped make it into something of a cult sensation. Rounders is certainly no masterpiece (sorry about that, coterie of fans), but it's a surprisingly engaging and entertaining film that features early work from Damon and some fine supporting turns by Norton, Turturro and Landau. I don't know quite what to make of Malkovich in this film, but let's just be charitable and call him "interesting." Rounders may be as improbable as that infamous last hand in that "other" poker film, The Cincinnati Kid, but it's a fun ride nonetheless. With a solid visual and audio presentation and some appealing extras, this release is Recommended.
2010
1993
1997
Theatrical Edition
1997
1990
2014
2016
30th Anniversary Edition
1993
1990
2013
2013
2009
1996
2013
2000
1992
2008
1991
1998
1991