not as good as all the hype

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This is good Argento move with great camera work and decent script. The acting is good and this move have plenty of tension but no gore to speak for but thats not the problem. Good Argento move not one of his best but not his worst. The film is not great when we compare the likes of opera,phenomena,inferno,suspira or even trauma but it has its moments. Card player is a quiet creepy triler that ofers some best music score I ever heard of.There are some boring moments but that is typicole for Argento move.Argento didn't make a great move after Opera and I think sleepless and trauma are one great ones as well but card player is not to far to be as good as those two.

One of the the great things about giallo is the blood and nudity. The serial killer takes the time to undress his victim before tossing her in the water, so we get to see everything.A little Saw and a little "CSI"/"Criminal Minds"; this film features a new gimmick. We'll play cards for the life of a girl.As the game progresses, the killer ups the ante by capturing the Police Commissioner's daughter and forcing the police to play for her life.As the police close in on the Card Player, he manages to get Anna Mari in his clutches and forces her to play a game for her life. It was something of a silly ending.

The Card Player' directed and co-authored by leading Italian filmmaker, Dario Argento is quite different from what I expected, based on Argento'' reputation based on his best known film, the horror classic, 'Suspiria' of about 20 years ago. This movie is much less Wes Craven and much more Alfred Hitchcock, although I think Argento does not quite measure up to the Great Hitchcock in his use of subtlety and surprise, although there are a few good surprises in this film.While this movie was made by a thoroughly Italian cast and crew, except for Irish actor, Liam Cunningham, almost all the original dialog as we hear it in the film was spoken in English as it was filmed. Mistaking this for a horror film was easy based on the cover art and some of the blurbs on the package. And, these hints are not entirely misleading, as there is a fair amount of intentional horror based on a fairly extended threat of death to a victim seemingly unable to free herself from the situation, unlike Hitchcock's secret threat, suddenly sprung on the unsuspecting victim as in 'Psycho'.The mechanics and most business of the story are ultramodern. The victims are kidnapped, bound, and gagged (albeit a bit amateurishly), and the prep sends an e-mail to a female police detective that in order to free the Vic, the police will need to have someone play computer poker with the prep, freeing the Vic by winning two out of three hands. The first victim is a British tourist, bringing the Irish detective attached to the UK consulate in Rome into the case. And, this detective happens to be a forensics expert, so a lot of his early investigations are straight out of the 'CSI' casebook. Although, none are so modern that you couldn't see almost the identical business in a movie made 50 years ago, just as you see them in the murder / suicide investigation scene in Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita'.Not only is the plot much more a thriller than a horror show, but the quality of the acting, directing, and camera work is high as well. Unfortunately, I feel the writing, in the implausibility of many plot turns, is just a bit too weak. While Argento may be one of the best known Italian filmmakers working today, his scripts fall far short of the great plot and dialog of Fellini and Bertolucci.One of the very first weaknesses is in the way the police failed to play the contact with the prep. Given the chance to bring in an expert poker player to play the hands, that task falls wholly nilly to the female detective who is not only a poor poker player, but has a monkey on her back about gambling and poker, as her father committed suicide after a failure at cards. For the second kidnapping, the police happen upon a detective who knows something about poker, but who fails nonetheless. Only with the third victim do the police enlist the assistance of an expert computer poker player, who succeeds in effecting the release of the victim.Explaining more implausibilities starts to give away some of the better parts of the plot, so I will stop there and note that this DVD has my very favorite feature, an audio commentary running the entire length of the film. The commentary is by the cinematic author, Alan Jones rather than by the director or his co-author or producer, but it's pretty good. Since, as the commentator notes, Argento does not film in any of the well-known tourist locations (except for a brief glimpse of the Pantheon and a scene in the Tiber), but in the 'real' bourgeois' Rome. So, commentator Jones gives us an orientation for where we are in Rome and on the events which help us understand the plot. He also points out the virtually total absence of blood in the film, which was a conscious decision by the director, since so many of his other films are so singularly bloody.

The Card Player is undoubtedly a minor work within the Dario Argento cannon - closer in tone to something like The Cat O' Nine Tails than the more celebrated likes of Suspiria - and a low-key precursor to his subsequent work for television; notably, Do You Like Hitchcock? and his two instalments for the Masters of Horror serial, Jennifer and Pelts. Like The Cat O' Nine Tails, the story of The Card Player takes on the usual Argento conventions of classic suspense cinema and the Giallo thrillers that would inform much of the filmmaker's greatest works - in particular The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Tenebrea and Profondo Rosso - but gives it a more smooth, sophisticated and mainstream approach that seems to avoid (for the most part at least) the various quirks, characteristics and personal idiosyncrasies that the majority of Argento fans have come to expect.The plot at first seems preposterous; a mysterious serial killer invites members of the Rome police force to indulge him in an online poker contest. If they win, his latest victim will go free. If they loose, she will be murdered live on webcam. As with his previous film Sleepless, the film attempts to update many of Argento's favourite genre tricks by juxtaposing the old, archaic conventions of the detective thriller against the modern, twenty-first century policing techniques. So, whereas Sleepless demonstrated the use of forensic evidence in tracking a brutal murderer (in relation to the tried and tested policing of retired detective Max Von Sydow), The Card Player looks ahead to the world of wire taps, computer surveillance and the general technological buzz of twenty-first century living.Where the film falls flat for many fans is in the plotting and execution (pardon the pun). Although I greatly enjoyed the first three thirds of this film - plot-holes and character quirks AN' ALL - the final third of this film slips sadly into the realms of complete farce. In fact, if I were to watch this film in the company of friends and family, I'd no doubt cringe with embarrassment if anyone happened to look over and catch me actually enjoying this literal train-wreck of a supposedly grand finalé. Everything we hate about Argento can be found in this clumsy, ham-fisted, badly-written, badly acted dénouement, from the previously strong central character suddenly becoming the helpless victim, to the pointless motive of the serial killer, to the continual ineptitude of the police force, and of course, our favourite, the horrible-dubbing and wilful over-acting of a character who, when lurking in the shadows, was the most terrifying force imaginable, now, out of the darkness and actually REALLY laughable (the same problem could also be found in Sleepless, to an extent).It's such a shame too, since much of the film finds Argento breaking new ground. He's toned down the eccentricities that plagued films like Phenomena, Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, and in doing so has stripped away much of the grandiose filming style he used to so effortlessly and vividly perform. It kind of works in the film's favour though, with this low-key thriller really benefiting from the natural lighting, unfussy composition and matter of fact paunchiness of the editing. He's also toned down the violence too, which is obviously going to be a bone of contention for many Argento fans, but again, I think he manages it within the context of this film.Going against the grain of my fellow commentators, I will say that I really liked the performances of the two central characters, with Dario for once fining a couple with something actually approaching chemistry. Not to mention the fact that they're characters that we can actually root for and care about; which again, was down to the chemistry and integrity of the performances. As a result, the performances also helped to really enliven a number of the more elaborate set-pieces, in particular the late-night game of cat-and-mouse between Anna and her would-be assassin (which brings to mind the brilliant double-bluff sleight-of-hand found in films like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria and Tenebrae) and a late night chase through the shadowy streets of old Rome which is really the Italian Hitchcock at his absolute best.Like I said, the ending is terrible, but much of the film (for me) was quite enjoyable, and if you can pick it up for under a fiver then I'd say it's definitely worth it. True, it's a far cry from the genius of his Iconic early work, but at the same time, it's nowhere near as bad as recent follies like Trauma and the risible Phantom of the Opera, so if you're an Argento completist then you're gonn'a want it regardless of the negative reviews. If, however, you have some familiarity with Argento, but have found his recent work lacking, then you might want to give it a miss (or at least try before you buy). For me, I'd be tempted to stretch to four stars, as I enjoyed the film - and the DVD transfer is a good one - but I'm knocking the grade down for the terrible ending, which really spoils a lot of the fun.