THE CARD PLAYER

Commissioner Anna Mari is involved by a mysterious serial killer in a perverse deadly game launched through the internet directly onto the police computers. Only by managing to win the video-poker games that the killer forces her to play, Anna will be able to save the lives of the kidnapped women. With the help of the English policeman John Brennan and a young hacker named Remo, she will try to corner the fierce and untraceable criminal intent on leaving a long trail of violent murders behind him. At the end of the screening, as soon as the lights in the theater come back on, the viewer's gaze is lost, almost lost in the void. The unpleasant feeling that accompanies him is that of having missed something, of having fallen asleep and having missed even just one minute of the film, perhaps that very minute that could give meaning to the entire film. And while he silently heads towards the exit, he realizes that he hasn't taken his eyes off the screen for even a second, that he hasn't missed anything. Only the feeling of emptiness remains. And the explanation cannot be anything other than one. “The Cardplayer” is a bad film. Plain and simple. If with “The Phantom of the Opera”, according to the unanimous opinion of his loyal public, Dario Argento had touched the bottom, with this new film he has managed to do even worse, so bad as to make the decent “Sleepless” seem a true masterpiece of modern horror. The 2001 film, despite its flaws, had been appreciated (without making people cry out in wonder) for its homage to the Argento masterpieces of the past, particularly “Deep Red” of which it faithfully retraced almost every step. The screenplay was interesting, the splatter effects definitely above par, and the inventions behind the camera left hope for a new youth for the Master of Italian horror. But expectations were completely disappointed. The plot of “The Cardplayer” is surprisingly weak, disconnected, and devoid of any element of tension, suspense, or discomfort to which the Roman director has more or less accustomed us over time. The film's characters seem glued to the screen by pure chance, devoid of a past and a present, out of place, and irritating more than once (just think of the insipid caricature of the singing-dancing medical examiner or the incompetent group of anti-hacker experts from the Police who desperately try to trace the transmission area of the serial killer without earning the slightest credibility in our eyes). And when the screenplay tries to open a breach into the past of the protagonist Anna Mari (revealing a father passionate about poker who committed suicide on the rails of a track), it does so in such a forced and clumsy way that it reveals itself to be only a necessarily obligatory connection to bring together the pieces of a thriller that begins to leak from all sides. Even more disappointing is the now vain attempt to mislead the viewer's suspicions about multiple, hypothetical culprits: some fixed shots on certain characters, their appearance at particular moments in the film precisely to make us doubt them, is so ridiculous as to provoke even some laughter. The identity of the killer ultimately turns out to be exactly what the viewer suspected from the first minute of the film but that unconsciously continued to exclude for its disheartening banality. And the motive that drives the serial killer to murder is even more banal. This disaster is undoubtedly contributed to by the embarrassing performance of the entire cast, also due to the original English acting dubbed into Italian, which, if possible, further distances the characters from their roles, from the screen, from their own credibility. A disaster all around. So far, the judgment does not differ much from the universally shared one on “The Phantom of the Opera”. How then can “The Cardplayer” be even worse? Easy to say: in this film, unlike “The Phantom of the Opera”, not a single drop of blood is shed. Nothing at all. What happened to the Master of Thrills? All the murder scenes are shown through a frame on a computer screen, in which we can barely make out only the face of the future victim and hear her discomposed screams. All the magic and choreography of Argento's murder are sacrificed and nullified by a miserable, tiny window on a monitor. And even when we finally find ourselves in front of a sequence that promises (at least in terms of splatter) something more, exactly at the liberating moment when the weapon strikes the victim's neck... sudden scene change! We are already at her funeral! The murder interrupted at the best moment, cut crudely without the slightest skill. Censorship? Editing error? Stylistic choice? Whatever the reason, the result is definitely disorienting and of poor effect. And meanwhile, the viewer's dismay and disappointment increase. Even if it is now shared by everyone that a horror film can be defined as such not only for its manifest violence but also for its dark and paralyzing atmosphere, in this case we are faced with a film that does not involve, does not scare, and does not show anything gruesome (with the exception of the decomposed corpses of the victims, very little...). If in a film lacking a solid bone structure you also remove the flesh, what remains? Practically nothing. In the final sequences, always focal points of Dario Argento's films, after discovering with disappointment the identity of the killer, we witness one of the most ridiculous challenges between good and evil that cinema history remembers. The entire scene is without bite, without tension, so surreal as to border on comedy, seasoned with that pinch of common psychology to annoy even the least intelligent among viewers. The last shot, set a month and a half after the events that lead to the unmasking of the serial killer, is also senseless: an additional touch of emptiness to a film that practically does not exist, so fragile, useless, and meaningless. It is a shame to speak with such irreverence of a director who has written the history of world horror cinema, of a genius of the camera, of a visionary of violence who has managed to make generations of thrill-seekers tremble. But a film like this does not deserve clemency or justifications: it is painful to admit, but the constant feeling is that “The Cardplayer” was shot quickly, without much conviction, with few ideas, and with little desire. The swinging microphone on the actors' heads that peeks from the top of the screen on two occasions betrays all the neglect and haste with which the film was made. The poverty of the plot, the dialogues bordering on the paradox, betray the approximation and laziness with which the screenplay was written. And as if that were not enough, this time even the soundtrack is insufficient: Claudio Simonetti is great, a capable musician with a keen taste for unsettling atmospheres, but this time he has truly made his worst cinematic collaboration. It is also possible that on CD the soundtrack of “The Cardplayer” turns out to be interesting and engaging, but the way the music has been integrated into the film just does not work. It does not manage to make its way into the viewer's mind, to leave a mark, as rarely as it is mentioned, it seems almost not to be present. Just think that the music that remains most in the viewer's mind is the annoying tune of the video poker! It is easy to imagine what the viewer thinks when leaving the cinema: Dario Argento is a myth, one of the greatest horror directors of all time, and I did not go to the cinema tonight. Or if I did, I went to the wrong room. Or if the room was right, I slept through the entire screening and saw nothing. But no matter how much one tries to remove such a great trauma, the truth is only one: “The Cardplayer” exists and is a failure. The only true Cardplayer who seems to have done his job great is our beloved Dario Argento who gives us a big, heavy, and disappointing two of spades.