Tiffany, Charlie and Vernon are con artists looking to up the ante from their typical scams. They figure a good way of doing this is taking down Dean "The Dean" Stevens, a well-known cardsharp, in a rigged game. However, they first need enough money to enter a game with Stevens, so they decide to strike a deal with fellow crook Larry Jennings to scam a local gangster -- which turns out to be a bad idea.
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You won't be disappointed!
best movie i've ever seen.
I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
The acting in this movie is really good.
Shade is set in the world of poker hustlers working the clubs and martini bars of Los Angeles. The tale unfolds as a group of hustlers encounter "The Dean" and pull off a successful sting that results in their pursuit by a vengeful gangster. This is probably one of the best movies about Poker with a very simple plot and some pretty talented actors like Sylvester Stallone, Jamie Foxx, Thandie Newton and Hal Holbrook as far as acting, script and story go they were pretty good the only part of the movie that was stupid was that scene with Rodney Rowland's character named Jeff but it's still a pretty cool and fun film and the ending was pretty awesome and it made sense how Vernon played his friends also Sly is great as ever and that's why i'll give it a 10/10.
Good movie for the less than 30s crowd. Also works for those who like to gamble at cards. I really loved Sylveste Stallone in this. He seems to always be good at what he does. If it were not for him, I probably wouldn't watch it. Melanie Griffith does fine for a supporting role. The movie plot runs a typical and predictable path. The bad guys always get caught. However, the movie does allow you to get into the thoughts and actions of the cast. This is a good movie for a bunch of singles to get together and chomp on popcorn. It provides a night's worth of entertainment, good cast and good acting. I am not real keen on the subject of gambling, but live and let live. After all, movies are there to be entertaining and this one is.
"Shade" tries hard to be another "Sting", substituting poker for horse racing as the means by which to bring down an enemy, but it fails miserably.I watched the whole thing and still never could quite understand why the young kid wanted to double-cross his partner. Was it because his partner stole his girl? Is there a woman in the world who is worth going to that much trouble over? If there is, it certainly wasn't this shrew. She had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and really now, did she actually have a special room set up so that a surgeon could remove the kidney from whoever tried to pick her up in a bar? Dina Merrill makes a short appearance as a rich woman who hosts, of all things, pay-the-rent poker parties at her palatial home. And then the players say things like, "I'll see your thousand and raise you another five thousand." Give me a break. You can't call ("see") and raise, you do one or the other. Any kid playing for nickels and dimes at the kitchen table knows this; you'd think grown men playing for stakes this high -- or at least the knuckleheads who wrote the script -- would know it too.One of the other posters mentioned how no high-limit poker game would allow players to actually deal their own cards and I agree. You don't allow two of the best-known car cheats into a game where the buy-in is $250,000 and then let them deal to each other. That's not poker; that's just seeing which one can cheat better. And I'd like to know what person in his right mind would buy in to a game in which two of the best-known card cheats are playing and expect that he might have a chance at winning? And most of all, what Mafia boss would run such a game? Every time Melanie Griffith came on the screen I was so mesmerized by those gigantic fluorescent red lips of hers that I completely lost the storyline, and seeing her and Stallone together was more like a public service announcement for plastic surgery gone wrong than a love connection. Stallone mentions that she used to be a grifter before she bought the restaurant she now runs, but we don't know what kind of grifter she was and we never see her working with Stallone in their younger days so we are left to wonder, if we even care that much.Jamie Foxx is the best character in the whole movie, but he gets killed off right off the bat and we're left with cardboard cut-outs who all sound like they're reading their lines off a teleprompter just off-camera.The ending makes no sense either. The kid gets his cut from the game and just walks down the street with a briefcase full of money and his partner is nowhere to be seen? The Mafia isn't watching every move he makes? Everyone else just shrugs their shoulders and quietly accepts the loss of millions of dollars without trying to recoup any of it? I don't think so.Most of all, this movie does a great injustice to professional poker players all over the world, insinuating that the only way to win is by palming cards and playing with "juiced" decks. And why is it they're always palming kings and aces? Sometimes you need a three or a nine to fill a straight or full house.The best parts of the whole film are the sleight-of-hand tricks during the beginning and ending credits; everything in between is ridiculous.
What a cast...and what a waste of it. Seriously, when a movie has Gabriel Byrne, Jamie Foxx, Thandie Newton, Stuart Townsend, Hal Holbrook, Melanie Griffith and Sylvester Stallone in it you would expect some quality. The movie is however one big mess with a unlikely story that can't seem to stop putting twist and turns in it. Yeah, I think that they thought they were really being clever with all of it.The story is not only messy and unlikely, it also isn't exactly terribly original. It uses elements from earlier and much better poker game based movies. But to me it were really the many pointless twist and turns in the movie that did it. It made the story such an unlikely one to watch. On top of that the script remains filled with a lot of holes silly poker game errors and things that just don't make an awful lot of sense. Why would any one above all things want to play against a card player that is known as the best cheater in the game. This is what the movie is about and builds up to but just didn't ever made a lot of sense to me.Despite that the movie has a great cast, it still feels as if most actors were miscast in their roles. I don't know what it is about Stuart Townsend. He is a good actor but in most roles he plays he always feels out of place. Perhaps it are his looks, I don't known. This basically also was the reason why he got replaced in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". Also Thandie Newton isn't much good and actually quite annoying in her 'strong' female role. And what was the point of having Melanie Griffith in this? Oh, I guess I could go on about the movie its casting and could complaining even some more about the way too limited screen time the Jamie Foxx character gets but I guess you get my point by now.Damian Nieman just isn't much of an original writer/director and on top of that he also doesn't handle his own material very well. Scenes often feel disjointed, it tries to put in way too many characters and everything about the movie is shallow and in a way predictable. On top of that the movie features some bad editing at times, which also doesn't help to make this movie look like one seamless whole. The movie was also one major box office bomb and no wonder that Damian Nieman hasn't made a movie ever since.A too big mess to make you enjoy this movie.4/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/