Execrable

Last night I watched another poker movie that was just truly painful to sit through--one of those that makes you wonder how it ever got made. Did all of the actors, writers, directors, producers, etc., really delude themselves into thinking that they had something worthwhile on their hands?

The movie is "Aces" (2006); see the IMDB entry here. It was a direct-to-video sort of deal. The story is that three California babes (pictured numerous times above, in my attempt to make up for this blog's previous severe deficiency of bikini photos) concoct a scheme to cheat at poker by marking the aces with a dye that can only be seen with special glasses. See those yellow smudges on the cards? That's what they do. At first they clean up, moving from joint to joint--exclusively private and underground games, so as to avoid scrutiny from casino security. But then their plan runs into some unexpected obstacles.

The mathematical whiz among them is forced to play without cheating, against a murderer's row of the most dangerous poker sharks on the planet, with her friends' very lives on the line (insert ominous chord here)! Fortunately, she has been reading books, and can calculate on the fly her odds of hitting, say, two pairs. So--and I'm sure you'll all be shocked to learn this--she prevails. Because, after all, as everybody knows, all you need to succeed against the best poker players in the world is to have read some good books on the subject.

We get the obligatory scene of them driving down the Vegas strip, plus some unexpectedly nice shots of Rio, when they end up invited to a high-stakes private game there.

The writing and acting are positively atrocious, worse than you'd probably get from an average high school drama class. The villain (Asian guy in the red shirt in the photos) mainly conveys how tough and angry he is by breathing extremely heavily, to the point that they probably had to have paramedics on the set to revive him after hyperventilating on every take.

But I have to give them props for this much: They have one bitchin' car, the sweet '68 Camaro shown. Were I a billionaire, one of those would definitely be in my car collection. One of the most gorgeous automotive designs ever.

There's lots of poker in the movie, but we see almost no hands played out. Instead, we just get the end of the hand, where the winner is revealed.

Predictably, they get lots of poker details wrong. For example: (1) As you can see from the screenshots, even in regular casinos (the one pictured is the Normandie casino in southern California), they're using generic one-color chips, just like in "The Big Blind" (see here). No, couldn't possibly be any security problem with that, could there? (2) As also depicted above, when players go all in, they invariably just shove their piles of chips into the already sizable pot, without anybody bothering to count them first. Yeah, that's going to be fun to sort out when the hand is over. (3) In a home game, one of the girls takes her turn as dealer. She says to the player on her left "You're the big blind," and to the guy two seats to her left, "You're the small blind." That is definitely the strangest blind structure I've ever heard of. (4) When the heroine is heads-up with the villain, at one point he bets, she calls, then he raises. In what bizarro poker world does a call re-open the action to the original bettor?

They can't even get details of regular life right. See the next to last photo above? Take a look at the $100 bills. Now pull a real one out of your wallet, or see one here. They apparently were so short on cash that they couldn't afford a few real Benjamins to dress up the shot. Cheapskates.

Oh, and as an extra little raised middle finger to the poker community, the filmmakers cast as the dealer in the white shirt seen above a guy who is the spittin' image of the vile, hated, enemy of all that is holy, Senator Bill Frist (may he burn in hell forever). (If you have to ask why "Frist" is now the f-word that is not allowed at poker tables, you haven't been paying enough attention to politics.)

This stinker ranks way down there with "The Big Blind," "Blowing Smoke," "All In," and "Shade." Even the awful "Luckytown" at least had better acting and production values. It's so bad that it makes me want to give a special award to "Lucky You" and "Deal" for not sucking quite as much as they possibly could have.