Poker Night (film)
| Poker Night | |
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Movie poster
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| Directed by | Greg Francis |
| Written by | Greg Francis |
| Starring |
Ron Eldard Beau Mirchoff Ron Perlman Giancarlo Esposito |
| Music by | Scott Glasgow |
| Cinematography | Brandon Cox |
| Edited by | Howard E. Smith |
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Production
companies |
Wingman Productions
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| Distributed by | XLrator Media |
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Release date
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Running time
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104 minutes |
| Country | United States, Canada |
| Language | English |
Poker Night, released in the UK as The Joker, is a 2014 crime thriller film that was written and directed by Greg Francis. The film was released to video on demand on 5 December 2014 and had a limited theatrical release on 20 December. Filmed in British Columbia, Poker Night centers upon a rookie detective that decides to attend an annual poker night held by veteran police officers, where each one details how they captured a murder suspect.
Stan Jeter (Beau Mirchoff) is a new detective who gets invited to play a game of poker with several veteran police officers and detectives. Each one tells Stan about various insights they gained from different murder cases they investigated, which turns out to be invaluable when Stan is captured and imprisoned by a vicious, anonymous assailant (Michael Eklund). He finds that he has been imprisoned with Amy (Halston Sage), the daughter of a police officer, and that he must use the stories of his fellow poker players to find a way for both himself and Amy to escape.
Critical reception for Poker Night has been mixed and the film holds a rating of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 8 reviews. The movie received criticism from the Los Angeles Times and The Dissolve for being overly generic and contrived, and The Dissolve noted that the actors playing the veteran cops were more interesting than the film's lead.The Hollywood Reporter and Bloody Disgusting wrote similar criticisms, and Bloody Disgusting wrote that "Nearly every time the film jumps back to the poker game then over to Jeter in bloody distress, the film just never manages to recover that feeling of anxiety it establishes early on."
In contrast, Fangoria and We Got This Covered both wrote favorable reviews for Poker Night and We Got This Covered commented that "Poker Night is a "wild card" watch, but Greg Francis flashes a winning hand by making a memorable monster out of Michael Eklund."
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