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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Bookies

Bookie$

 

Picture: B     Sound: B-     Extras: D     Film: B-

 

 

Some films start out with such promise, then suddenly take a nosedive.  It is always a shame when that happens, especially these days, when so many films start out so badly to begin with upon conception.  In the case of Bookies (with the logo using a dollar sign), the situation has three college friends deciding to go into the gambling business themselves, no matter what a risk it might be.  That is part of the fun, more or less.

 

Toby (Nick Stahl) is our humble narrator, telling us how his smart friend Casey (Lucas Haas) and real character of a friend Jude (Johnny Galecki) eventually decide to pull together their connections and resources to do booking of college games on campus itself.  At first, the film is smart and even promises to give us insight into the world, which would have made for a fine film if they had just stuck with it.  The arrival of a love interest for Toby (Rachael Leigh Cook) works well, but then director Mark Illsley starts to let his poorer judgment take over and the film begins to slowly go off course.

 

This begins when the sped-up film moments start to kick in.  Once was fine, but then it becomes repetitious and pointless, sadly translating into the film becoming clichéd before turning into an unrealistic outright cartoon by the end.  Since the cast and tone were right to begin with, why mess with what worked?  Part of the problem is moving away too much from the basics that worked.  Also the casting works so well that you believe these people are friends.  Too bad Illsley and screenplay writer Michael Bacall were not friends enough to the film, great cast and audience to keep the film on course.  When they stopped imitating Scorsese, they simply did not know where to go and all bets were off.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is nicely transferred, shot by cinematographer Brendan Galvin with a nice use of colors that show once again that you can make a gritty film that does not gut out the color so much that it turns into colorization in reverse.  It is the highlight of this DVD and a decent performer, so low budget filmmakers should check it out just for this, if not to see how not to do such a film.  The film was a Dolby Digital release, but the Dolby sound on this disc is 2.0 stereo with Pro Logic surrounds.  I bet this was 5.1 originally, but should have been if not otherwise.  The only extra are hard-to-get-rid-of trailers before the film begins (keep hitting the chapter skip button) and a trailer for this film, which is really for its DVD release anyhow.  The audience and there actors deserve better and that will hopefully happen next time.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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