Parents' Guide to Dead Money

Andy is appropriately moody and serious as a whip-smart high-stakes poker player, but his character quickly gets overshadowed by all the violence and stagey plot devices. By the time the story takes it shape, it doesn't really matter who Andy is. He's supposed to be a fearless and amazing poker player, but at the same time, he's supposed to be an "every person," just a normal young man who wants to live a normal life with his girlfriend. With dozens of dramas and thrillers constructed around poker since the movie Rounders sent this subgenre into orbit, Dead Money finds it difficult trying to carve out its own identity. It turns out this movie isn't really about poker at all, even though it tries to find real-world applications for strategies and wisdom taken from years of playing the game. But these inner-monologue moments feel forced and contrived.

While initially this film suggests that it might be about the harsh realities of the high-stakes poker life, the film instead reveals itself to really be about a heist or robbery gone wrong. And there's no grand underlying conceit or deeper psychological stakes in any of the actual poker-playing scenes (like in Casino Royale, for instance), so the stakes of Andy's final game don't feel all that high. He merely needs to win a lot of money so he can pay off various people. Not exactly inspired stuff here. Throw in a few cringey scenes of bad dialogue, bad acting, or both, lots of unnecessary bloody violence (just for the sake of it, it seems), and no character development whatsoever, and this thriller ends up not being worth anyone's time.