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"TILT" NOTHING BUT A BIG BLUFF
Feb. 18, 2005
When at the poker table, a player who's "on tilt" is losing, flustered, and desperate. He's making plays he shouldn't and watching his chip stack dwindle. With that in mind, it seems somehow fitting that "Tilt" is the name of ESPN's new Thursday night scripted poker series, a show that wants to convince you it's a gritty, behind-the-curtains look at Vegas poker … but is actually little more than an empty dramatic bluff.
I must admit, even I'm surprised I don't like this show. After all, being a 30-ish poker lover who regularly turns in to watch real-world poker coverage, I practically define the target audience. Meanwhile, the guys who created "Tilt" have the perfect resume for this show. They scripted the excellent Matt Damon-Ed Norton poker flick, "Rounders." To top it off, they get Michael Madsen, already a member of the cool-guy hall of fame for playing Mr. Blonde in "Reservoir Dogs," to headline the cast. All signs point to a killer show. So why do the right cards not fall?
"Tilt" tracks three, young, hotshot poker players as they cruise Vegas' glitzy casinos and seedy bars, risking their money and lives to build a bankroll large enough to take down Don "The Matador" Everest (Madsen), a much-respected poker champion who uses his celebrity to fleece thick-walleted Vegas vacationers at rigged Texas Hold 'Em games. Our trio of heroes isn't particularly interesting--that's the show's biggest problem. There's Eddie (Eddie Cibrian), the charming poker stud whose father was a gambling addict; Miami (Kristin Lehman), the hot blonde who uses her feminine allure to gain an advantage at the tables; and Clark (Todd Williams), who was driven to a gambling lifestyle by his prominent Ivy League father whose expectations Clark could never meet.
Ho-hum.
All three have some reason or other to want a piece of Everest, as does Lee Nickel (Chris Bauer), a lawman who suspects "The Matador" may be responsible for his brother's mysterious disappearance. None of their back stories are particularly intriguing, though, and the incredibly forced dialogue doesn't help. For example, consider this little bon mot, spoken by Clark as he weighs the cons of a cash-laundering scheme: "The Feds will be on me like Tara Reid on a jock strap." If that's not bad enough, the main characters are big on using poker terminology to describe life. No matter what Eddie's doing--washing his clothes perhaps--he's yammering away about "coming over the top" and "forcing a player to fold." Yeah, we get it. It's a poker show. These scripts make one long for the subtlety of Phil Hellmuth.
Other quibbles include the all-too-easy camera zooms on decks being shuffled and chips being stacked. Every episode of "Tilt" also seems to include no less than three pointless montages. A recent installment even included a morgue montage featuring Nickel taking photos of a corpse. (Isn't there plenty of that already happening on a certain other Vegas-set show?) If you're not annoyed by the montages, perhaps the flashbacks will do you in. "Tilt" will replay moments from earlier in the exact same show just to make sure the viewer is paying attention. That kind of paint-by-numbers storytelling is insulting to the audience.
Finally, the actual card games--the one thing "Tilt" needs to get right--aren't even exciting. The camera swoops over the table too fast to clearly see the nature of any particular hand, and the writers never really show us why these card sharks are as good as they are. My advice--you'll find more drama on ESPN reruns of "The World Series of Poker" than on "Tilt." And that way, you guarantee no heavy-handed plotting will get in the way of a good game of cards.
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