Tagline:
Trust everyone… But always cut the cards.

Wide Release Date:
September 11, 1998

Directed by:
John Dahl
Written by:
David Levien, Brian Koppelman
Produced by:
Joel Stillerman, Ted Demme

Starring:
Matt Damon
Edward Norton
John Turturro
Famke Janssen
Gretchen Mol
John Malkovich
Martin Landau

PREGAME THOUGHTS

For those who haven’t been to college, or aren’t old enough yet to go college, or perhaps spell “college” with a “d”, on-campus residence halls usually have older students who are stationed on certain wings or floors to be designated resident assistants. These kids are usually extroverted stoners who opt in mostly for the free room and board. As far as I’m concerned, their only useful task for the entire year was posting themed nametags on the individual dorm room doors. On the dorm floor of my freshman year, the nametags were in the form of movie posters. Just door after door of total film-bro shit. I had Rounders, a movie I had never heard of before 2005. I saw that movie poster multiple times a day for months and months. Matt Damon and Edward Norton looked like a couple of punchable douchebags!

My pregame assumption was that Rounders glorified gambling and painted some glitzy, overwrought glamor of playing poker with heavy doses of unchecked testosterone. I assumed the mafia would be involved and someone is going to get their ass kicked to high heaven!

The name of the game is Twelve-Card Snakes. Aces in the hole are wild. Effective nuts are a gap hand, you may as well have a pre-flop open-ended straight draw with that shit. Rabbit hunts are for children. Roll your own and run it twice. The crow flies at midnight.

THE 350(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a young poker savant who spends a lot of his free time hitting underground mafia-run poker games and risking a lot of his money. One day, he plays Teddy “KGB” (John Malkovich), a Russian mobster with an atrocious accident and a stupid John Malkovich face. Mike is overconfident and bets his life savings on a hand and loses like a little punk.

This makes Mike’s relationship with his girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol) tense, presumably. The movie jumps ahead a bunch of months so we don’t actually see a lot of these problems, but my dude ain’t allowed to play poker anymore so he shifts his focus back law school. He’s kind of forlorn, but he handles it well until his best buddy Lester “Worm” Murphy (Edward Norton) gets released from prison. Worm’s a terrible friend, coaxing Mike into helping him play some poker games so he can pay off an incredible debt he had racked up before getting thrown in prison. So Mike helps him, because bros before hoes even if your bro is a horrible, skunky bro. Soon enough, Mike slips back into old habits and lying to Jo about his involvement with the various poker games.

Even Martin Landau can’t hide that he’s tired of Matt Damon’s meshuggeneh gambling addiction.

Eventually, the situation culminates to a $25,000 debt owed to a guy working for KGB. Mike vouches for Worm, like a complete out-of-his-mind lunatic, and agrees to get the money in five days. He’s not able to do it. In a moment that requires the most suspension of disbelief from the viewer, Mike talks his law professor, Judge Petrovsky (Martin Landau), into loaning him $10,000. He takes this money back to KGB and offers to clear the debt with another one-on-one poker game. KGB accepts.

Mike earns his money and is prepared to leave, but KGB basically calls him a chicken, and Mike sits back down to win it all. After another suspenseful chunk of movie time, Mike outplays KGB to win the full pot of $60,000. All his debts get paid off with enough to replenish his original bankroll. He ditches law school and his girlfriend and fucks off to Las Vegas.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — The Poker!

I was happy, and surprised, when this movie didn’t showcase some overwrought men’s fantasy version of high-stakes poker glamour. Certainly, there’s still plenty of wise guy shit, though. A bunch of swingin’ dicks, pissing contests, at one point Edward Norton takes a big shit right on the table! OK, no, that didn’t happen, but you know his character probably did that at some point in the past.

Now, the only other card game movie I’ve ever seen was 21, that 2008 blackjack heist movie with Kevin Spacey, and it was total dogshit. I’m not a poker player, but I know enough to know that constantly getting dealt incredible hands =/= a good poker player. The most famous poker scene in the last 20 years is likely from Casino Royale, where James Bond has a lucky hand that simply can’t be beaten. That’s not skill, son. At least Rounders emphasizes the necessity of bluffing your way through success.

Still, though, Matt Damon gets a lucky break too often (at least on-screen), and that last hand where he tricks Malkovich into going all in is the luckiest break of luckiest breaks. A total Hollywood situation. Malkovich loses fair and square because didn’t know that Damon, as the coolest kids in town say, “had the nuts”.

Even more unrealistic? Malkovich’s big fat tell? This seasoned poker player with a ton of money on the line chows down on Oreos if he has a good hand. That’s fucking stupid. Matt Damon feels like a genius for figuring it out after sitting down with the guy for six hours.

They even do a giant close-up shot, just in case you weren’t hit over the head enough with the dang Oreo.

TOPIC 2 — The Accents

Matt Damon’s thick New York Goodfellas accent, especially while he’s narrating, gets grating.

“Listen, here’s the thing: If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

“You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once.”

“Worm’s dad did the grounds, when he wasn’t too fuckin’ drunk. That’s when we did ’em. Of course, the grounds weren’t all we did. Worm put us into a scam a day on all the young aristocrats we went to school with, selling ’em dime bags of oregano, nunchakus and firecrackers from Chinatown.”

It’s like, what the fuck are you even talking about? You grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But don’t even get me started on Malkovich’s cartoonish Russian accent. Dressed like the captain from the Hotels.com commercials, I was expecting him to start roaring about the moose and squirrel at any moment. “Hee beet mee. Strah-raight up. Pay zaht mahn hees munny”.

TOPIC 3 — Matt Damon Didn’t Fuck Famke Janssen

Go to any corner of the internet where discussions about Rounders are archived, or are still happening in some cases, and someone will inevitably mention their complete disbelief that Matt Damon’s character turned down Famke Janssen. Oh, but no one ever mentions any complete disbelief that Famke Janssen made a move in the first place, OR the fact that Mike McDermott doesn’t show much sexual interest in anything throughout the film, except maybe Teddy KGB’s Oreo fondling.

I don’t have much else to say about this one! Matt Damon did a bad job of allowing fat nerds to live vicariously through him for two minutes. Matt Damon didn’t fuck Famke Janssen!

Matt Damon didn’t fuck Famke Janssen.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

According to a Howard Stern Interview, the film is partially based on comedian/actor Norm MacDonald.
Ah yes, rest in peace Norm MacDonald, whose gambling addiction caused him to lose all his money three times and file for bankruptcy twice. Now that’s a better story.

Right before we see Worm released from jail, he shaves his goatee off. This was the same goatee that Edward Norton featured in “American History X” which had had filmed months prior to this film. You also notice that his hair is shorter than the rest of the film and that was the result of Norton’s hair growing back after completely shaving it off entirely for that film.
Don’t you all think Rounders could have benefitted from a curb-stomping scene? Subverted though, with Edward Norton biting the curb. And Famke Janssen doing the stomp. Gruesome and unnecessary, yes, and would have likely become fodder for some fetish websites, no doubt about that either, but MAN people would still be talking about that scene to this day!

Neve Campbell turned down the role of Jo.
Probably because she had to prepare for the mountain of movie and TV roles she would be offered between 2005 – 2015. Pfft.

The hand that Michael uses to beat Teddy KGB in the final game against each other is “Flopping A Nut Straight”, which in this case was an eight of spades and a nine of spades. It was the same move that Johnny Chan used in the game that Michael was watching on his VCR when Petra came to visit him at his apartment.
See Topic 3 in the previous section for on how Matt Damon’s character totally “flopped the nut straight” during that apartment visit, lmao

Hi! We’re the Poker Boys! We’re here to play a game :]

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yeah, it was better than I expected. It holds up pretty well, especially since this movie predated the enormous Texas hold’em cultural boom by a few years. It maintained a somewhat reasonable amount of authenticity while enhancing the suspense of the game.

Scour any poker discussion groups and you’ll hear a bunch of bitching about how stupid Rounders is with respect to game accuracy, but these people are complete nerds to who would rather their Hollywood poker movie just be tournament footage. This movie makes poker exciting for people who know nothing about poker, so it did its job.

And Edward Norton is excellent at playing the obnoxious fuck-up friend from old-times. He doesn’t get as much screen time as I would’ve liked, but at least his paisley button-down shirts are loud enough to seem like he had more screen time!