Product Description
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Academy Award® nominee Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, and Dane
Cook headline this outrageous action-comedy about greed, revenge,
and a desert full of dead Elvis impersonators. A priceless Apache
war has been stolen from an Indian casino causing criminals,
frat boys, tomahawk-wielding hit men, modern-day cowboys, and a
six-foot-tall blonde assassin to rampage through a small town in
hopes of cling the treasure first. s, Girls and Gambling is
an action-packed comedy where the laughs pile up faster than the
body count.
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The trifling diversion that is s, Girls and Gambling flows
directly from the postmodern hipsterism of the Tarantino school.
You know the genre: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Seven Psychopaths,
Smokin' Aces, Snatch, and the plethora of Pulp Fiction-inspired
ironic dramedies that have played with outrageous scenarios,
narrative structure, elaborate casting, and darkly violent humor.
Those qualifiers seem kind of a mouthful for a movie that largely
succeeds as a wisp of episodic entertainment and harebrained
farce. Though cockeyed and crazy in the way its timeline keeps
shifting, the basic story presents an ordinary guy named John
Smith (Christian Slater) narrating his own tale of adventure
across the Utah desert. After a precious Native American relic
disappears from a casino, he and it are hotly pursued by an
assortment of cowboys, Indians, lawmen, assassins, and Elvis
impersonators. But nothing is really as it seems, and the movie
ultimately breaks its own rules by lying to us about some
fundamental plot points. Not that there's anything wrong with
that, especially since s, Girls and Gambling is all about
cheating and untruth anyway. The farcical tone is established
right away in the scatter way the movie introduces the
players with title graphics that are derivative clues to its
roots as scion of the Tarantino society. The narrative is far too
convoluted and silly to summarize; the movie's frenzied pace is
the more important element anyway. The boldfaced cast members are
picked off one by one as they abandon the casino and spread out
across the bright, arid landscape. A key moment at a poker game
between battling Elvis impersonators (Gary Oldman, Chris Kattan,
et al.) gives way to chase with cowboys and Indians (Jeff Fahey,
Powers Boothe, Matthew Willig, and others), lawmen (Dane Cook,
Sam Trammell, Paulina Gretzky, to name a few), a Pocahontas
(Megan Park), and a leggy blonde killer with a fondness for
quoting Edgar Allan Poe (Helena Mattsson). That takes care of the
s, girls, and gambling, but it doesn't come close to
condensing the zaniness and mayhem of their interactions or the
rhyme or reason of how and when they're dispatched. It's not hard
to see why s, Girls and Gambling became an orphaned,
direct-to-home product or how it may have run off the rails
during its low-budget production. Though the movie delivers for
the market it ed for, there's a flatness of spirit in its
slapdash nature that often undermines the pedigree it strives to
achieve. But it's fun to follow along, and the ending perks up by
making hash of what was already an overcooked stew. --Ted Fry