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Deal (2008)

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1 article from 2008

25 April 2008 2:07 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

In his dazzling poker book Positively Fifth Street, which chronicled a grisly piece of Las Vegas history alongside his own unlikely run in the 2000 World Series Of Poker, Jim McManus describes a poker tournament as "four days of intense boredom interrupted by brief moments of sheer terror." Poker movies have the advantage of cutting straight to the terror, but Rounders excepted, nearly all of them are intensely boring. If the stakes are clear and the audience has enough investment in the characters, every turn of the cards can be heart-stopping. But if too many more movies like the abysmal Deal come along, making the final table at a poker tournament is going to seem as exciting to the layman as an afternoon in line at the Dmv. Owing much to the grizzled mentor/naïve student dynamic in The Color Of Money and Hard Eight, Burt Reynolds and Reaper's Bret...

Scott Tobias

1 article from 2008