These matters carry little weight because they don’t arise organically from the storytelling, but are simply crammed in. We’ve already had a gratuitous car chase now the card game itself passes in a flicker, overwhelmed by plot developments involving poison, one figure’s terminal cancer diagnoses, deep dark personal crises everyone else is hiding, and so forth. Coates) cannot stay focused long enough to fulfill that promise of a clever caper. While it’s taken the movie some time to get there, at this point we assume its focus will be cat-and-mouse gamesmanship à la Pupi Avati’s 1986 ingenious “Christmas Present” (and its 2004 “Christmas Rematch” sequel), in which another quintet of swells sat down to a score-settling poker tournament whose reversals of fortune were sharply character-revealing.īut Crowe’s screenplay (which is credited as based on a story and preceding script by Stephen M. (Also present for that purpose are Daniel MacPherson as Jake’s lawyer, and Elsa Pataky as a card dealer whom the camera introduces cleavage-first.) Ergo he’s most eager to seize the opportunity when Jake, once they’ve arrived at his ultra-modern compound outside Sydney, makes a proposition: Each of them can keep as a gift the luxe next-generation car they individually arrived in, or forfeit it in favor of being staked $5 million in a round of Texas Hold ‘Em. Only Mikey (Liam Hemsworth) seems to have floundered, though he can blame no one but himself. While they’ve drifted apart over the years, they’ve done well: Alex (Aden Young) is a successful author, Paul (Steve Bastoni) a politician, late-arriving Drew (RZA) a high-flying entrepreneur. After a bizarre spiritual-retreat interlude with one “Shaman Bill” - which seems included solely to provide brief screentime to Down Under screen legend Jack Thompson - Jake calls on his old mates for a reunion of mysterious purpose. In the present day, Jake (Crowe) is now a tech billionaire, albeit with the weight of the world on his shoulders for reasons we don’t fully grasp until later. After a swim in an idyllic quarry, they’re challenged to a game by a local bully, who naturally is enraged by his loss. A prologue finds our protagonists as teenage besties in what looks like the late 1970s: five rural Aussie lads already obsessed with poker.
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