Sometimes a movie comes along that offers a raw uncorrupted glimpse into a niche of life, a lifestyle, or a grim and gritty underbelly of something glamorous. While it might not be great for poker it appears Shark Out of Water will be just that type of movie. That’s not hard to believe as most gambling movies seem to skew toward the corrupted side of things. While the movie Rounders helped usher in a new generation of Texas Hold ‘Em players as much as it glamorizes poker it also showed cheating, playing in and out of debt, the seedy circles poker players move in, and used the counter balance of Ed Norton’s character Worm to be the darker half of Matt Damon’s character Mike McD.
The odd thing about Rounders is it took Chris Moneymaker’s run to the WSOP championship to bring in their secondary audience on dvd making it kind of a cult movie, and its looked on fondly by the poker community as most people focus on the positive aspects of poker the movie highlighted: skill over luck, the ability of a good player to make money easily and honestly, and the daring of a character willing to risk it all because of his belief in himself. A whole generation of online poker players have sought to prove this conceit and hundreds and thousands have.
What is remembered less is the exposure of live poker where even the cheating Worm barely prospered, the shadowy mob figures that controlled poker in New York, and the extremes/subterfuges it took to play in a juicey game. The movie was two characters chasing a debt and then one player chasing a dream. What it didn’t show was the fact many people chase that dream and fail.
Shark Out of Water, even as a short, examines that theme with a modern clarity. What poker player hasn’t groaned with exasperation “I’m just running bad,” and ignored just how bad he’s been playing. Cameos by Brad Booth, a player who has experienced both the highs of the nosebleed games to the lows of squandering a bank roll playing too far out of it, and Phil Hellmuth, a player who seems, even if it is calculated and carefully cultivated, to only have lived the high life of poker is another study in contrasts.
The main character is struggling to live the life he envisioned. Perhaps, he has to come to terms with the fact he started off running better than he is, and dealing with the beats that poker can put on a person. Will he be a fast rising Icarus that burns out as quickly as he soared, or will he be the type that can build sustainable success. Ask any poker player and they’ll tell you it’s a tough way to make a living. This movie attempts to show in a post Rounders age just what that means.