The Card Player, 2004.
Directed by Dario Argento.
Starring Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Fiore Argento, Conchita Puglisi.
SYNOPSIS:
A Rome policewoman teams up with a British Interpol agent to find a crafty serial killer who plays a taunting game of cat-and-mouse with the police by abducting and killing young women and showing it over an internet webcam.
It has long been said that Italian maestro Dario Argento’s post-1980s career has been – at best – something of a mixed bag, with 1987s Opera widely acknowledged to be last movie he made that could stand up alongside his notable classics such as Tenebrae, Suspiria and Deep Red. However, sometimes it can be an interesting – and even fun – exercise to look at an artist’s lesser appreciated works, especially after a lot of time has passed, to see if maybe we were too harsh on it or at least be able to pick out some nuggets that reflect past glories, and, thanks to Shameless Screen Entertainment, Argento’s 2004 effort The Card Player is finally hitting 4K UHD and is ripe for reassessment.
Anna Marie (Stefania Rocca) is a cop investigating a serial killer known as the Card Player who preys on women. The Card Player challenges the police to games of online poker for the lives of his victims, viciously killing them on live web cam if the police lose, and after a British woman becomes the latest victim, heavy-drinking Irish detective John Brennan (Liam Cunningham) is brought in to help the Italian police, but how many more women will be kidnapped and killed before Brennan and Anna Marie find out who is responsible?
On paper, The Card Player has a very Argento-esque plot and the director has never shied away from using contemporary themes in any of his movies, so with this being the early(ish) days of the internet and online gaming being relatively new it seemed that basing a giallo around computers, the internet and modern technology would be a good fit for the filmmaker. The trouble is that Dario Argento has always been a visual director, his movies full of suspenseful set pieces and inventive kills, and The Card Player doesn’t display any of his previous flair or techniques, meaning that when the titular killer and the designated poker-playing cop go head-to-head you literally get several minutes of low-res computer graphics showing you what cards are being played against the reactions of those watching the computer screens.
If you were a cop witnessing a live poker game between a colleague and and killer then no doubt it would be tense and nerve-racking, but none of that comes across when watching the movie, as someone pointing and clicking a mouse is not especially terrifying, and by the time the final act comes around it feels like Argento and co-writer Franco Ferrini lost interest in trying to maintain any sort of suspense and just cobbled together something to wrap it up quickly.
The movie is also surprisingly light on blood and gore. There are moments that remind you of old, like when one victim springs a trap and gets spiked, and the corpse effects are superb, leading to a The Silence of the Lambs-style clue that gives our detectives a lead, and when the script goes into investigative mode The Card Player picks up and becomes a solid police procedural, but this is a Dario Argento movie and there are no experimental camera manoeuvres or big effects pieces to give it a money shot. With that in mind, the overall look of the movie is less exaggerated than Argento’s usual style, with a more natural – even colder – colour palate and a slick, but uninspiring, feel to the cinematography.
Nevertheless, an Argento movie in 4K UHD is always a treat to see and The Card Player does benefit from the upgrade, and the director’s original choice for a natural colour scheme pays off as the grain has been left intact and the levels of detail are impressive, especially during close-ups, and the excellent corpse props look all the more realistic. The dubbing in the movie was never great, and although the new Dolby Audio mix does improve things a little as the background effects, voices and Claudio Simonetti’s electronic score are nicely balanced, there are instances where the voices you hear don’t seem to be coming from the actors you can see, but no amount of tinkering at at this stage is going to make it perfect. As is the case with the visuals, the format upgrade improves upon previous releases, so job done as far as that is concerned.
Overall, though, The Card Player still feels like a disappointment in Argento’s catalogue of work. It certainly isn’t his worst movie, and for the most part it is a fairly enjoyable giallo, but when put up against his other movies it feels too generic and lacking any of the spice that Argento used to sprinkle his movies with to make them stand out, or at least make them a little more interesting. The new 4K restoration is nice to look at and is certainly worth the upgrade for Argento fans and collectors, and the cast and crew interviews on the disc all help to add context, but if someone new to Dario Argento wanted to see what all the fuss was about then The Card Player is not the movie to introduce them with, and in the context of his post-1980s movies it may not be as daft as Giallo or as tedious as The Stendhal Syndrome, but neither is it as engaging as Dark Glasses or as much ghoulish fun as Mother of Tears (surely on the list for a 4K release, Shameless?), sitting somewhere firmly in the middle.
The Card Player is on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital platforms from 10 August
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
