Guns, Girls and Gambling [DVD]

Amazon.com The trifling diversion that is Guns, 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 Guns, Girls and Gambling is all about cheating and untruth anyway. The farcical tone is established right away in the scattershot 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 guns, 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 Guns, 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 aimed 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 Product Description 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 mask 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 claiming the treasure first. Guns, Girls and Gambling is an action-packed comedy where the laughs pile up faster than the body count. ]]>
ASIN: B009VCE806
VSKU: 4EKTGN00011T_ns
Condition: Good
Binding: DVD