Croupier

British filmmaker Mike Hodges made an extraordinary debut in 1970 with Get Carter, a masterpiece of neo-noir with Michael Caine as a lean, mean cockney contract killer. Since then, who has heard from Hodges? For a time, it seems Croupier might be his 30-years-after belated comeback, as it plunges its faltering-writer protagonist, Jack Manfred (handsome and sullen Clive Owen), into the absorbing casino subculture. Although his novel barely bubbles on his computer, Jack comes heatedly to life employed as a croupier, a James Bond-like tuxedo'd dandy, his beautiful hands dancing poetically with blackjack cards and chips. There are inviolate rules to being a croupier, and one by one, self-destructively, Jack violates them all, mixing it up with a female employee and getting acquainted, intimately, with "punters" (gamblers) outside the workplace.

Unfortunately, Jack isn't the only bungler of opportunity. Director Hodges throws away his film with fatuous, preposterous plot twists. And the mannered, self-conscious, voiceover storytelling (the screenwriter is former film critic Paul Mayersberg) becomes more and more annoying as the story unravels and Croupier gets crappier and crappier.

-- Gerald Peary