Poker Face Movie Is Not So Much About Poker | Available On Hulu

Poker Face is a thriller movie about a tech billionaire Jake Foley, his life, his family and friends. Not to be confused by Poker Face tv series. The movie is written and directed by Russel Crowe, and he plays the main character. It was released in 2022. I am not sure if it is available on all streaming platforms, but I watched it on Hulu. This is not Russell Crowe's best work. Crowe has is a great actor and have starred in many amazing movies, and Poker Face is not one of them. The movie is not bad, I just had higher expectations from a movie that starred Crowe. There was nothing wrong with acting and overall cinematography either. The issues I have are with the story it tells. Ideas were not bad either. Kids becoming friends for life, finding poker interesting, getting involved in tech and building something new, the family story, all of these story ideas had great potential to develop on. I think they were able to connect them all seamlessly together, or weren't able to deliver the full story.

It is still a good movie to watch. It is of high quality, entertaining, and thought provoking. It could have been better. As usual my critical views are usually about the storyline and how the story is presented.

Spoiler Alert: The contents of this post may contain spoilers. If you haven't watched the movie yet, and do not want to read the spoilers, you may want to stop reading here. Feel free to return after watching the movie to share your thoughts.

Events in the movie ware taking place in Australia. It starts with showing youngsters biking, exploring the nature, jumping off the cliffs and having fun. They grow up together and remain friends for life. The early scenes tell and show how this group of friends became interested in playing poker, all different variations of it. One scene also shows a bully who wanted to take their money by force, but was outsmarted to play poker to win and ends up losing. As they escape the fight they all jump off the cliff. Later in the movie the same bully reemerges as a criminal breaking into Jake Foley's mansion to steal some expensive art. The same bully and the criminal turns out to be one of the Jake's friends' brother.

After briefly showing their childhood, the movie turns to present where Jake Foley is a wealthy entrepreneur who owns a company that sells software to government. Jake and four of his best friends create this software and the company together. As internet is spreading globally, the friends see an opportunity in creating an online poker gambling website. Somehow this poker game software transforms into a software that gather data on people and the company makes money by selling the data or the software to the governments. It is not entirely clear how this transition happened. This is where the story starts falling apart. I still do not understand how the transition from poker game to a spying software happened. I can see that the poker game platform or software could be used as a spyware. But this data would only cover very small percentage of the population. I doubt governments would have any interest in such services. If they found out, they probably would deem such company as criminal one and put them out of business.

Maybe better explanation is that they got into tech by building online poker, but this gave them the programming and building skills they utilized to create more sophisticated software. This sounds better, let's go with that. However, the only wealthy individual among friends is Jake Foley. One of the friends is a politician, another one writes books, third is alcoholic, and the last one is the right hand man. So five friends start a company and only two remain part of it. Only one is super rich, and the other one is presented as assistant rather than a partner. It doesn't make sense. Towards the end of the movie it is revealed that other friends sold their shares in the company very early and didn't want to be part of it. Two who remained ended up becoming successful, however it doesn't look like they were partners either.

Jake invites everybody to his place for a get together and planning to throw a high stake poker game. Ok, before this there a couple of scenes that are important to the movie. The first, Jake visits an art galleria. Clearly he enjoys art, his mansion is full of expensive art. When his is in the galleria and looking an art piece with a sad face, an artist secretly take his photograph. Later the same artist approaches him and ask for his permission to paint him. He doesn't agree to be present when she paints but he does give her a permission. At the end of the movie a painting of his sad or pondering face is displayed at another art gallery. It seems that's why the movie is named Poker Face, although I don't see any connection of this to the rest of the story. The second scene, is where Jake goes soul searching, he is deeply troubled and goes to a natural healing place for a few days of therapy. This scene showed even though Jake was super rich and successful, he wasn't happy. He had issues and things that made him sad.

The family story. He has a daughter, the only daughter. It seems they have a great relationship. But both have gone through difficult times. Jake's wife died a few years ago. It seemed he and his daughter were still in pain. I doubt such pain ever goes away. It is great they have each other to comfort and rely on. This storyline wasn't explored more, except to show how devastating it would be to Jake daughter to go through another loss, loss of her father. Jake finds out he has cancer and doesn't have long to live. Now it is starting to make more sense why he would visit art galleries, and why he was sad. He knows he doesn't have long to live, and he also knows something bad about his friends, something like betrayal. He can't wait for them to come clean and talk about it. That's why he invites them all for a get together, to have an honest discussion over a poker game. Before he makes these plans, he has used his company's spying software to spy on his friends. That is how he know someone has betrayed him.

When friends arrive at his building, they are greeted by his assistant and given instruction to pick any of the expensive cars in his garage and race to his mansion in some isolated nowhere place. They all pick the cars they like and race starts. In the meantime Jake is traveling to the same place on a helicopter. This doesn't make sense. All this choose an expensive car and let's race thing doesn't really connect much. It just shows Jake is rich, his friends aren't.

At the same time his politician friend is having strange phone calls, and trying to cancel some kind of shady deal from happening. He wants to stop them from going to Jake place. The criminals don't seem to care and don't listen to warning that Jake and his friends will be home, when they try to rob the place. So this criminal is the brother of Jake's politician friend and the bully from the childhood scene.

When all friends arrive at the mansion, Jake is happy to see everybody. To celebrate the occasion Jake pours wine for everybody. Then Jake tells them they all can keep the cars they have picked, or they can trade them for $5 million worth of poker chips and play high stake poker together. The catch is if they choose to play poker chips they have to play the game. Of course they all choose to play. Otherwise the movie would end. They started the game, but don't even finish it. Now we thought the entire plan was to play poker. It is in the name of the movie. But it actually had nothing to do with the poker game. The game didn't matter at all.

Now is the time to start telling the truth. Friends start feeling not so good. Jake informs them that the wine was poisoned. The reason he poisoned the wine glasses is because one of them was betraying him. Later he says he only used very small amount of the poison, so everybody was ok. Nobody was going to die. But as they start the conversation, they start revealing things about themselves. His alcoholic wasn't doing good and have been considering to commit a suicide, and even brought a gun with himself. His politician friend was being blackmailed and had to give Jake's address for them steal his art. His writer friend was having an extramarital affair. So none of them were happy. Then Jake reveals that he has cancer.

In the middle of these conversations, they hear someone was breaking into the place. They see intruders on the camera and go to a panic room to hide. Now they need to figure out how to get rid of the intruders. As this is happening, Jake daughter found medical document about his cancer. She is not happy that her father didn't share this with her. Jake's girlfriend is with his daughter, tries to explain her and calm here. They both drive to the mansion and arrive there at the same time as the burglary is happening. They end up becoming hostages to get Jake out of the panic room. All of this madness ends with Victor dying by being tricked to inject himself a poison, thinking it was antidote to the poison.

The movie ends with Jake's will being read in the presence of his friends and daughter. They all receive generous inheritance. Half of his wealth is donated to various charities, including to charities who help gambling addicts. His friend who helped him run the company becomes the head of the company. His politician friend gets $50 million and a wish he stops his political career. His alcoholic friend also gets $50 million with a condition his finishes a rehab program. His writer friend who also betrayed him by having an affair with his girlfriend is forgiven, and they both get $50 million. Rest of the estate goes to his daughter.

What doesn't make sense is if he was willing to share his wealth friends, why hasn't he done so while he was alive. If they were truly best friends why have they fallen apart from each other, so that they wouldn't even hesitate to betray each other. Even Jake himself spied on his friends. That is not what friends do. Maybe they do. I am not a life expert. But this story could have been better. Poker game, poker player, money, art, tech company, lifelong friends, tragedy in family, individual struggles are all good storylines to explore. I think too many of these ideas were put together and were not explored to the fullest. Perhaps it could have been a better overall story if the movie only focused on only a couple of them.

Regardless of my criticism, now thinking about the movie again as I am writing this post, I think wasn't that bad. Maybe it is more realistic story, rather than what we would want it to be. Watching it wouldn't be a waste of time. Let me know your thought if you have seen the movie.