Break Down
In the “Stand By Me” portion, teen Jake Foley survives potentially getting stomped by local bullies by way of a hand of poker, involving his best buddies, who’d all been swimming in the local rock quarry.Foley then grew up to be a professional card player who put his money to good use. Along the way, his wife died, leaving him with daughter Rebecca (Molly Grace). Jake married again, to Nicole (Brooke Satchwell), but the relationship was more transactional than loving, although Nicole is a good mother to Rebecca.
Like the pro gambler he is, Jake trusts no one, and so he keeps close tabs on both his wife and his friends, all of whom are up to no good in various ways. Jake’s grown friends are: Alex (Aden Young), who is secretly sleeping with Nicole; Paul (Steve Bastoni), a prominent politician mired in debt and scandal; suicidal alcoholic Michael (Liam Hemsworth); and business partner Andrew (RZA).
They are all called together by Jake for a men’s weekend at his house, which involves the boys racing each other in some luxury cars, and which of course ultimately ends up being a poker game. But not really a normal game—Jake gives each player $5 million in chips. Winner take all. Then, an art theft (the fault of one of his buddies) goes down, just as the poker is heating up.
Summary
The main problem with “Poker Face”—and there are a few—is that it’s really hard to understand Jake’s motivation for being a good friend to these guys who have all backstabbed him in a variety of ways. They’ve all managed to create pretty sweet lives for themselves (with the exception of alcoholic Michael), largely due to the skills Jake taught them as kids.“Poker Face” is meant to be sort of biblical, like, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” however, I mostly ended up feeling like I wanted to smack his shiftless stupid friends around.
It feels like Crowe is after something deeper, what with the Shaman, the dying wishes, and the bequeathing of great riches to all and sundry, but he ends up pulling the rug out from under his good intentions, as mentioned, by shifting into a new movie every 15 minutes or so.
It’s not a complete mess, but close. You can’t care about anyone involved, except Jake, and it feels like Crowe wasn’t confident enough in his primary objective—to illustrate things that break friendships and how to repair friendships—so he threw in everything but the kitchen sink.
Best part: watching Crowe act again. The man can act, and he’s actually very engaging as this character. Robert Redford, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and Kevin Costner are top-shelf actors who are also top-shelf directors—it’s possibly the trickiest juggling act in show business. An actor’s taste and choices as an actor may be brilliant, but that taste doesn’t always automatically transfer to the director’s chair. Watching Crowe’s poker face play poker in his own movie is just not worth watching the rest of “Poker Face.”
