The title “Poker Face” refers to a reckless methodological cunning that unfortunately proves out of reach elsewhere in Russell Crowe’s second effort as a writer and director. Brilliantly produced as his first historical drama of 2014 “The Water Diviner,” it offers a more padded narrative with its myriad elements barely having time to record before we hit nearly 10 minutes of crawling into the end credits. Filmed in Australia, this mix of plot, drama, thriller and theatrical never quite lives up to the gels, despite enough surface gloss and cast experience to grab attention. Screen Media launches theatrically on a few dozen US screens this week and to digital formats on November 22, with other regions following.
Up front, our heroes are teenage best friends in what feels like the late ’70s: five Australian country boys who are already obsessed with poker. After swimming in a poet’s quarry, they are challenged to a game by a local bully, who is naturally angry at his loss.
Nowadays, Jake (Crowe) is now a tech billionaire, albeit carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders for reasons we didn’t fully understand until later. After a strange spiritual break with “Shaman Bell” – which seems only involved to provide a short screen time for under-screen Dawn legend Jack Thompson – Jake invites his old mates for a reunion with a mysterious purpose.
While they have separated over the years, they have done well: Alex (Aden Young) is a successful author, Paul (Steve Bastoni) is a politician, and late Drew (RZA) is a high-flying businessman. Only Mickey (Liam Hemsworth) seems to have tripped, although he can’t blame anyone but himself. He’s so excited to seize the opportunity when Jake, once they arrive at his ultra-modern compound outside Sydney, makes a suggestion: they can each keep the luxury next-generation car they’ve individually arrived at as a gift, or confiscate it. In favor of getting $5 million in a round of Texas Hold ‘Em. (Also present for this purpose is Daniel Macpherson as Jake’s attorney, and Elsa Pataky as a card dealer offering the camera the split first.)
Although the movie took a while to get there, we assume at this point that its focus will be on the skill of cat-and-mouse games. style Pupi Avati’s 1986 movie “Christmas Present” (and the sequel to 2004’s “Christmas Rematch”), in which another quintet of poses sat in a poker tournament to filter out the scores in which reversals of luck were sharply revealing.
But Crowe’s script (which is credited based on an earlier story and script by Stephen M. Coats) can’t stay focused long enough to deliver on that promise with clever wit. We’ve already had a free car chase; Now the card game itself is in a flash, mired in plot developments involving poison, someone’s eventual cancer diagnosis, deep dark personal crises that others are hiding, and so forth.
These matters have little weight because they do not arise organically from storytelling, but are simply crammed into them. As if the narrative agenda wasn’t loaded enough already, three armed thieves (Paul Tason, Matt Nabel, Benedict Hardy) – including a bully teenager from the past, of course – arrive, hoping to escape with Jake’s valuable artwork. Then his wife (Brock Satchwell) and daughter (Molly Grace) uncomfortably show up, and need to confront him about some upsetting news.
And so Poker Face swings from the “Stand By Me” kind of nostalgia to lifestyle fantasy and through several other modes. When the violent thriller section ends, we end up with a Maudelin note in which Jake essentially pays tribute to magnanimity. These very long closing credits include a powerful song co-written by Crowe, which also contributed three more songs to the soundtrack. By this point, the movie that first sparked expectations of a hilarious band show had already defined itself as an elaborate vanity project.
As an actor, Crowe is in blissful shape here, while as a director, he doesn’t want ideas, capable collaborators, or professional gloss. But there are so many elements in the game that the result seems uncluttered and superficial, not as satisfying as an elegant escape or as something of the heart. The Water Diviner was similarly surpassed, but the breadth of his canvas made an excess of melodramatic elements easier to accept.
“Poker Face” sounds like a concept that started out as a fun time and then started creaking with so many themes and hardware that it installed until its structural foundation collapsed. As she struggles to keep the characters straight, she notices sloppy logical gaps, like the mysterious servants act of fading away, or the fact that the main peer group characters don’t seem to inhabit the same age range at all. (Hemsworth is the youngest Crowe by a quarter of a century.)
Not to mention ultimately rocking the entire premise that Jake will make his lifelong friends jump through a series of intricate hoops backwards in order to… prove he loves them? This good-looking and expensive movie ends in a tearful pool of life lessons learned. But they seem the type that you have to be either a tech billionaire or an international movie star to find them related.
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