I know Dario Argento to be a master of atmospheric horror. His best work tends to be dark, moody and suggestive. And this attempt at a thriller is definitely not among his best work. Its premise seems full of promise (particularly considering who the director is), but never delivers on its potential. Think of this as an attempt to make “CSI: Rome”, only longer, much more boring, gratuitously gory and without any of the elements that make the different instalments of that series so good.

The Card Player of the title is a serial killer who abducts young women and then uses them as stakes in a game of online video-poker with the local police force. Best three hands out of five wins the game and the Card Player will cut a piece off the girl for every hand he wins. If he wins the game, the girl in question dies, if he loses she is set free. Because the first victim was a British tourist, a policeman from the British embassy is brought in. He is teamed up with a female Italian officer, the only one who can remotely stand him, for this troubled, hard-drinking, forensic expert is doing nothing to make himself liked. Together with a poker-genius they are trying to catch, or at least outplay, the killer.

It is my impression that this movie got screwed up in editing. There is probably a better film in there somewhere, but the individual scenes are rudely welded together, they seem unconnected and as such make it hard to keep the viewers attention. The scenes themselves are rushed when the director should take his time and dwell far too long when the action needs to be moved along. Also it seems as if all the relevant information about the characters has been edited out. At the beginning we are thrust right into the movie, there is no introduction of the main female character, save a far too short one. The action between the main characters is rushed beyond credibility. For instance, about five minutes after they’ve met, and about two seconds after she has called him a bastard, our British cop is already divulging his painful secret to his Italian colleague. It is all too sketchy to make any sense. There is no flow. And because of that, there is no tension, which is particularly unfortunate since this is supposed to be a thriller.

Instead of actual tension, the director introduces a bit of gore that is neither here nor there. It appears in the form of two redundantly crude post mortem examinations, which are performed on a pair of make-believe corpses that, in terms of special effects, rate just above a shop-window dummy. The exams themselves serve no particular purpose in terms of plot development. And later Argento ads a bit of computer-technobabble that even the writer of this review (who’s computer knowledge has not evolved since WordPerfect 5.1) could easily diffuse and dismiss.

Now in several other reviews I have ranted and raved against dubbing, my number one pet peeve of all time. Well, here comes another one, for part of this movie is, you guessed it, dubbed. I am assuming this is done to edit out the accents of the English speaking Italian actors for the benefit of an American audience, but come on people! Surely the average American moviegoer can take a bit of an accent if that yields a better movie-going experience! Because now the viewer is stuck hearing a bunch of fake sounding voices, that do not match the performances (or even the mouth-movements) of the supporting cast. I say supporting cast, because thankfully the two leads (Liam Cunningham and Stefania Rocca) are spared from the dubbing atrocity.

The dubbing makes worse a series of flaccid acting performances by the entire supporting cast. Only when Cunningham appears (thankfully this is early in the movie), things perk up, but even then only a little. Cunningham has more talent and starpower in his little finger than the rest of the entire cast put together. Which means he’s about two sizes to large for the rest of the actors to deal with. Which in turn means this movie is completely lopsided. Stefania Rocca is a small notch better than the rest, but she too is no match for Cunningham. I have know idea how an actor of his ability got cajoled into making this blotch on his resume, but I am sincerely hoping he got a large amount of money for it. Although I don’t think any amount of cash could possibly compensate for being in this failure of a film.

Am I making myself clear, dear reader? Unless you really don’t have any kind of a life, watching this film is a waste of your time.