The Card Player
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2004
Rome detective Anna Mari pairs up with rogue Irish cop John Brennan to find a gambling serial killer who challenges the police to games of online poker to save the lives of kidnapped women. Twists and turns (but not that many) ensue.
Some people seem to hate that the poker game in this hasn’t aged well graphically, but I prefer to think of how much it would cost a director today to replicate a period technological thriller set in 2003 and just enjoy it for the time it’s set in. It’s an odd film, though. Brennan starts the film as an aggressive idiot and never really becomes believably likeable as the love interest for Mari.
There’s one outstanding set piece in Mari’s apartment where the killer breaks in to kidnap her, but apart from that there’s not much here to make it stand out from most procedural serial killer thrillers. It’s dramatically empty—we just lurch from one game of online poker (on Windows 2000!) to another.
This might be the most disappointing Argento so far. Say what you like about his The Phantom of the Opera, but it tries for something new.