Cheap Croupier [IMPORT] (DVD) (Clive Owen) (Mike Hodges) Price

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Customer Reviews of Croupier [IMPORT]

PM fable...Existential Thriller...
This is the brilliant...as yet cult...movie where Clive Owen makes serious bones. Directed by Mike Hodges of GET CARTER fame (legendary,existential gangster epic starring Michael Caine as ruthless Limey-Mafia Enforcer),he and too-cool-for-school,Clive carve-out a cinematic fable about PM amorality and view-to-a-kill consciencelessness." Welcome to the House of(the Dead)addiction!" declares Jekyll-like Jack Manfred to Hyde-like Jake, THE CROUPIER, as he leads his UNDERGROUND MAN doppleganger(and viewer)into endless nights of the jaded Casino demi-monde.

"I don't gamble!" chants Jack/Jake,power-tripping DEALER playing god while tempting others to grovel. "You're my conscience," Owen pleads to Gina McKee playing guileless Marion Nell his Guardian Angel lover. [She is ex-detective and mall rent-a-cop who, threatening to "shop" him, is remorselessly forgotten after she is killed by unknown thugs.] Alex Kingston plays the mysterious JANI (double-faced seductress)who lures Jack unbenknownst into incest and complicity in Marion's murder.

Lastly, there's BELLA.Kate Hardie plays ex-prostitute and druggie cohort CROUPIER who...like Dracula... puts kiss of damnation on whatever's left of Clive's illusions of himself as man "beyond good and evil"and scorned weakness of GAMBLERS he mocks and provokes. Director Hodges employment of jaded greens;luminous blacks; and toilet-tile whites, to film his odyssey into PM's First Circle creates powerful ambience of despair that's similar to the final jolt in GET CARTER. Like Jack Carter,Jake Manfred is hot-to-trot pro; watching him in action(shuffling/dealing cards like a conjurer;copping chips like Midas hoarding gold)bedazzles. But that he is a LOSER,the film leaves little doubt. Godless "gamblers"...imagining they're WHEELS...find themselves spinning endlessly under reckoning glare of THE CROUPIER who is mankind's eternal foe, as he mockingly roles them as his undying dice...

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How did it get to be a hit?
Mike Hodges and Paul Mayersberg's "Croupier" was released in Britain as a low-budget sleeper and went on to do some serious business in the USA, based on some very high-powered reviews and, presumably, audience loyalty.

Yes, Mike Hodges directed that camp classic, Flash Gordon. He also directed one of the finest British gangster movies, Get Carter, with Michael Caine, many years ago. Paul Mayersberg's script for Croupier must have tempted him somehow or other, but frankly, it's hard for this viewer to see how.

It's not that Clive Owen doesn't bear up manfully as the eponymous novelist/casino dealer of the title. It's not that Gina McKee isn't good as his long-suffering girlfriend, or that Alex Kingston isn't luscious as a mysterious South African woman, or that Kate Hardie doesn't bring her own brand of weird hoydenish charm to her role as a fellow croupier (croupiette?) with a "troubled" past. It's that this film sucks. And the fault can be slapped in the face of the writer.

The plot, insofar as there is one, is pretty risible - Owen plays a novelist, Jack Manfred, who has worked as a croupier in his homeland of South Africa. Down on his luck, he takes a job in a London casino. Here he meets a Ruthless Casino Owner, a Breezily Amoral Fellow Croupier who takes him to a Decadent Nightspot, and after a while he gets involved with a Luscious Femme Fatale (Kingston) who has a bizarre nude scene - she walks into a room without a stitch on and proceeds to put on a nightgown before going to sleep with Jack, who is in the room already, and I mean Sleep. Why did this happen? Did we just totally have to see a naked woman at some point in this film? Not that Alex Kingston isn't exceptionally easy on the eye, cause she is - but the scene makes no sense, as we are led to assume that the two characters don't ever actually have sex.

Meanwhile, Jack tries to write his novel about an Amoral Croupier, but his Life Is Becoming Like His Book. Whatever chance this film had of being interestingly nuanced and ambiguous is steamrollered by a galumphing voice-over of stunning literal-mindedness. Just when we can see Owen thinking "What an interesting woman", the voice-over says "Jack thought, what an interesting woman", and so on.

Most of the time frame of the film is compressed into the last ten minutes. The voiceover is so boringly obvious, the dialogue so cheesy, that you wonder why this wasn't a novel, just as you wonder why Owen's character wasn't a screenwriter. I'm prepared to believe that Mayersberg knows a lot about the business of casinos, but it doesn't make him a writer.

The original audience for this movie knew what they were doing when they let it die. What Americans have since seen in it frankly escapes me. Croupier is a bunch of fine actors and a good director struggling to polish a lump of tacky, third-rate coal. It was never going to be a diamond. Let it go. Unless you fancy a giggle at the badness of it all.

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Cool, Ironic, Understated Mayhem
A struggling writer who's a talented cardsman gets a job as a croupier, thanks to his father, in a London casino. From there the film moves into a complicated scheme to rob the casino, with violence and double dealing along the way. The one unexpected bit of retribution that hits Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) has emotional power. The ending is not exactly nihilistic, but has more than a bit of irony.

Mike Hodges, who directed the first-rate Get Carter with Michael Caine, brings the same cool approach here. Owen is perfect in the lead, and the rest of the cast is excellent. Croupier is a very good story very well done.

The DVD transfer also is excellent. There are no extras.