The game, I should add, is high-stakes poker as played in secret cribs all over Manhattan.

Norton is superb in one of the bad-boy roles that will probably color the shape of his career.

He doesn't mind getting the stuff kicked out of him when he's caught, and he's at such a level, he doesn't really need to cheat. Worm (played by Edward Norton) is Mike's opposite he's got the same advanced gifts for feeling the flow of the game, but he's addicted to cheating. He's in law school, living with a beautiful fellow student (Gretchen Mol) and working on getting on uptown.īut the worm turns. But Mike played with earnest gee-whiz charm by that earnest gee-whiz actor, Matt Damon has allowed himself to grasp at the mainstream, to build dreams just as fragile as any daylight dreamer's. Mike McDermott knows exactly what he ought to be: a professional poker player, because he's got all the moves and can decode the semiotics of the table. And if you've got the talent, you're even luckier. It makes one excellent point you should be what you're meant to be, and if you know what that is, you're a lucky man. Then they take their money so adroitly the rubes don't even know it, except once in a while, when the rounders get greedy or arrogant character, as corrupted by talent and chaos ensues. But as brilliant as they are as card sharks, they're better as people sharks: They read rubes like primers, from the wiggle of their nostrils to the eloquent language of their constricting larynxes. They can do more than count cards, they can alphabetize them. It watches card players touched with genius, so far up the pyramid, so into the ozone of jacks and clubs, they can feel the run of the numbers and memorize the sequence of the face cards. It's about talent, and whether you let it corrupt or liberate your character. John Dahl's 'Rounders' is full of tense poker scenes, where fortune rides on the snap of a card and the loft of a bluffer's eyebrow or how many times someone holding for real licks his lips, but it's not really about card playing. Matt Damon is a card shark in 'Rounders.'

What poker game in rounders