One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Rebecca De Mornay - yes! Vincent D'Onofrio - yes! Delroy Lindo - yes! Michael Madsen - yes! What more could you want in a movie.Put them in Vegas and give us a story about robbery, and you got me. yes, you got me - with a movie that just didn't seem to go anywhere. It just jumped all over the place and had no consistent theme.Wendy Riss is just not a scriptwriter, yet. Work some more and get it right.I expected much more from director Alex Cox, especially after the job he did with Rosario Tijeras. I was so disappointed.Not a winner!

Thought quite possibly this film would be entertaining due to the fact that it was dealing with Las Vegas. After viewing a few scenes, I was completely disappointed in the story. However, the poor actors all did a great job despite their horrible scrips and story line. Rebecca DeMornay,(Louise) played a gal who has been around the block quite a few times and decides to get her eyes and claws into a certain guy who bets only on Sunday's at a casino and always wins. As soon as the guy wins large amounts of money, like $150,000. he gives all the money away and keeps about Five Thousand dollars so he can play next Sunday. Saverio Guerra,"Becker" TV Series '98-03(as Bob) makes a few brief appearances and acts just the same way he did in Becker. This is a big waste of time and not worth waisting your time.

A finely tuned and taut script may have been laid to waste here by careless, directoral miscues.Philip (Vincent D'Onofrio) goes on a roulette winning streak in Las Vegas and discovers some hard lessons about faithfulness and betrayal. One of the central themes -- what happens to a person when he finds himself suddenly in the grips of material and financial wealth, and just as importantly, what happens to the recipient's so-called friends and acquaintances in relation to that recipient -- is worth conveying and, as a viewer, exploring in all its nuance and implications. The script certainly seems ready to achieve that -- not to mention there's a near-all-star cast to boot -- but in the hands of director Alex Cox, all the talent (both in terms of cast and script) seems to have been for naught. Cox directs with an uneven hand so that the movie lacks the tonal consistency it deserves. He also exhibits schmaltzy tendencies that move us away from the essence of the script -- it speaks volumes that the movie, which was originally titled "A Darker Purpose" (an acclaimed play by Wendy Riss, who also wrote the screenplay) got turned into a movie titled, well, "The Winner." One can't help but wonder then what would have become of this script if it had fallen into the right director's hands.

What could the concept have been for this muddled, laughable "thriller?" Oceans 11 meets Pulp Fiction? Ouch! What a misfire. I kept wondering what ARE all those crazies doing up there on my screen?