High Rollers review – John Travolta leads a charmless casino raid of staggering stupidity
Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean's Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman. High Rollers is a heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can't help but guffaw.
The idea is that Mason Goddard (John Travolta, who has finally given up on hairpieces and embraced the bald) leads a rodent pack of skilled thieves and conmen. The gang is first met at the beach wedding of two of the group's younger members, tech whiz Link (Natali Yura, mouth permanently agape) and dim hunk Caras (Swen Temmel). Alas, the nuptials are interrupted when international criminal Salazar (Danny Pardo) and his henchmen swoop in and kidnap Mason's wife Amelia (Gina Gershon, somehow surviving this with dignity intact). Salazar demands that Mason and his crew, which also includes his gormless safecracking brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) and sidekicks Anton (mononymed Quavo) and Hector (Noel Gugliemi), must steal the contents of a safe in the suite of casino owner Zade Black (Demián Castro) at his supposedly classy New Orleans casino the Scarlet Pearl.
Even the name of this fictional gaming facility sounds trashy, and when we see its interior – all lurid carpeting and easily wipeable soft furnishings – it looks less like Monte Carlo's finest than the kind of seedy regional gambling den that the producers could hire cheaply. The air of tawdry cost-cutting pervades every level of the film, from the casting to the costumes to the paste jewellery that's supposed to stand in for posh gemstones. There are tons of holes in the plot, but those are too tedious to parse; just study the frame closely and you can have a laugh at the truly hideous pictures on the walls that someone on the team thought would pass for fancy art.
High Rollers is on digital platforms from 16 June.
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