Young women are being kidnapped throughout Rome, and the madman holding them hostage isn't seeking money or trying to make some sort of political statement. No, he just wants to play a game of online poker with the police. Win three hands out of five, and she's set free. Lose, and she dies. For each hand lost, something will be amputated. The authorities are reluctant to play along, but after the first corpse washes ashore, detective Anna Mari (Stefania Rocca) and British forensics expert John Brennan (Dog Soldiers' Liam Cunningham) set out to stop his reign of terror. Of course, the killer is the one holding all of the cards...

I know I shouldn't like The Card Player. The premise is ridiculous. The way the mystery unfolds and many of the set pieces that are used make the movie feel as if it should be sandwiched between The Crow 2: City of Angels and Out for Justice on a Thursday night on HBO Zone. The movie grabs a variety of stock plot points off the shelf, from the tortured female cop who's attacked while alone in her home to the disgraced, drunken detective seeking redemption to the cop who stumbles onto the killer's hideout but doesn't bother to call for backup to the movie's absurdly over-the-top finale. Some of the line readings from the supporting cast are painful, and I'm not sure what compelled Argento to tack on such a brief, pointless epilogue (at least it's not one of those one-last-scare shots).

That's a fairly long list of complaints, and I could keep going if I felt motivated. I don't, though; The Card Player may not be particularly inventive, and it doesn't have the same visual flair as Argento's earlier works. I can't logically make any sense of why I feel this way, but I greatly enjoyed The Card Player. It does an effective job maintaining tension throughout, and even though a poker interface that requires the user to click on each individual card to see what he's holding should be grating, I could feel my pulse quicken with the turn of each card. The juxtaposition of the muted screams with the goofy game graphics and its tinny MIDI music teeters on darkly comedic. The tight shots of the victims' faces on the webcam as the killer flashes a box cutter in front of their terrified eyes made me cringe -- in a good way -- even though the movie's almost entirely devoid of gore. The most graphic imagery in the movie is post-mortem, and Argento unflinchingly documents the examination of the killer's nude, waterlogged victims. As many times as I've seen similar shots in other movies, the poking around in lifeless, mutilated corpses is still unsettling.

Argento also tries something different with the murders in this movie. There are usually extended stalk sequences in his gialli, but in The Card Player, there are no P.O.V. shots from the killer's perspective, and Argento's trademark black gloves are only briefly seen. The audience almost never sees anything that the protagonists aren't seeing, and I think that contributes to the tension. His films typically have a murderer that hardly anyone would've guessed from the outset. The Card Player takes a more American approach, and if you're up on Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, you'll be able to figure out the "who" (though not the "how" or the "why") with very little effort. There's virtually no on-screen gore, but having a girl screaming through her gag on a fuzzy webcam after a box cutter disappears from view...not knowing the extent of what's going on, other than that she's being butchered...is far more effective than I would've thought. The Card Player may not fit the expected definition of a 'good movie', but at least it's an entertaining one.

Conclusion: No, The Card Player is not one of the more memorable films to be helmed by Dario Argento. As difficult as it may be to ignore its directorial credit, readers who focus on the movie as The Card Player and not Dario Argento's The Card Player may walk away with the same opinion I have -- that it's an entertaining and effective thriller, if not a particularly remarkable one. Good but not great, although I enjoyed both the movie and its supplemental material enough to recommend this DVD. Recommended.