The Guardian - Publicerad för för 17 timmar sedan

Ballad of a Small Player review – Colin Farrell seeks redemption in Edward Berger’s high-stakes gambling yarn

Debts, secrets and a cartoonish Tilda Swinton catch up with Farrell’s self-styled ‘Lord Doyle’ as he confronts his own destiny in a chance to win salvation

The vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing if static and overwrought psychological drama-thriller; it is about a desperate chancer and gambling addict, faced with the metaphysical crisis of renewing or annulling his existence by staking everything on a single bet. Screenwriter Rowan Joffe adapts the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, whose title is ironic. He would not have these problems if he really was a small player. He is a big player and a big loser, although his smallness comes through in other ways.

Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself “Lord Doyle”, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; he is a despised “gweilo” or foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy guy with an outrageously spivvy moustache and a flop sweat, running up a massive bill at the kind of five-star establishment which tolerates this sort of thing on the tacit understanding that the guest will bet and lose massively at the hotel casino. Doyle never lets the staff in to clean his room so wakes up hungover every morning in an accumulating chaos.

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