The Bluff in ‘Liar’s Poker’ Gets Called

Elliptical and stylized, sleek-looking yet lame, “Liar’s Poker” is a modern-day noir cloaked in attitude and atmosphere and very little else. It plays like a young filmmaker’s attempt to see how much he could strip from his story without losing the audience. Character, motivation, most of the plot--this movie’s been boiled so hard they all dropped from its bones.

First-time writer-director Jeff Santo peopled his film with stone-faced men who are so affectless and emotionally barren that they’re distinguishable almost exclusively through their looks and bits of physical business. With nondescript names like Jack and Vic, they might as well have been assigned colors as identifying tags, much as Quentin Tarantino--whose work obviously influenced Santo--did in “Reservoir Dogs.”

Santo, a playwright whose father, Ron Santo, played baseball for the Chicago Cubs, comes across in his writing and on his Web site as a swaggering man’s man. Women are treated like property for the most part. The plot involves money and a woman--make that two women--who may have been “misappropriated” from their rightful owner or otherwise improperly handled.

Santo is good at generating tension. His manipulation of music and mood create a relentless sense of impending danger. From the earliest scenes we’re waiting for someone to explode--even the gratuitous sex scene crackles. But ominousness alone isn’t enough.

“Liar’s Poker” clearly owes a debt to Michael Mann’s “Thief” (1981). That movie’s icy sparseness evoked the sense--as Ernest Hemingway said about icebergs in his famous analogy about writing--that true meaning lies beneath the surface. If Santo’s movie has deeper meaning, then he buried it too deep. Or maybe it got stripped away with everything else.

Like “Pulp Fiction” and its crime-movie progeny, “Liar’s Poker” jumps around in time. After the first scene, which shows a group of tough guys taking a drive in the country, the story shifts to “A month ago. Cancun, Mexico.” Nothing in this segment makes much sense. Then we go “Ten days earlier.” Scattered in and between these sequences are enigmatic scenes that could have happened still further back in time. Or maybe they’re happening now. We can’t tell, and we don’t really care.

Also as in “Pulp Fiction,” Santo’s usually tight-lipped characters sometimes go off on tangents, telling little stories about themselves that have nothing to do with anything. Tarantino’s talkers typically have something amusingly offbeat to say, but in “Liar’s Poker” nobody’s having any fun. Men talk while gazing flinty-eyed into the middle distance, with long pauses between words uttered in plodding monotone. Even other characters seem uninterested.

Flea, the lead bassist from the band Red Hot Chili Peppers, plays a prominent role, as a flunky for the chief bad guy. He acquits himself well for an amateur actor, but he’s clearly an amateur, the least assured presence on the screen. Inexplicably, though--and this is typical of Santo’s many missteps--he’s the only actor given anything close to a character to play.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence, sexuality and language. Times guidelines: one not-particularly explicit sex scene but several disturbing scenes of stabbings or shootings.

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‘Liar’s Poker’

Richard Tyson: Jack

Jimmy Blondell: Vic

Flea: Freddy

Paul Sloane: Niko

Pamela Gidley: Linda

Amelia Heinle: Rebecca

Neith Adrina: Brooke

Colin Patrick Lynch: Art

A Savino Brothers Production distributed by North Branch Entertainment. Director and screenplay Jeff Santo. Producer Billy Savino and Santo. Executive producer Billy Savino. Cinematographer Giles M.I. Dunning. Production designer William Perretti. Editor Kathryn Himoff. Music supervisor Tim Bomba. Music Peter Himmelman. Costume designer Diah Wymont. Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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