Gratuitously twisty, turny nonsense: Sky Max’s Poker Face reviewed

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t you? The intelligence services would be queuing up to employ you for interrogations; top law firms would pay you top dollar to act as their adviser; you’d win gazillions in all the poker championships; you’d never buy a dodgy second-hand car, not that you’d need to with all that money you’d have. Admittedly, though, your life and adventures would make for a very boring TV series because everything would be so easy.

Hence the tortured premise of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, in which we are invited to believe that our heroine, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), has blown her skills spectacularly. Instead of playing poker, for example, at one of those high-stakes competitions in Vegas, and allowing herself to lose the occasional hand so as not to give the game away, she has gone around the country, playing for low stakes, and always winning, till word has got out – because gamblers always talk. An evil, shadowy casino boss has rumbled her, and threatened her (why? Why doesn’t he make use of her skills instead?), and forced her to stop gambling. Now she lives in a trailer park and ekes a living as a waitress in the casino.

My problem with this is the same problem I have generally with Johnson’s most recent screenplays, such as the overrated Americans-do-Agatha-Christie Knives Out, and that even more annoying farrago that Netflix inflicted on us over Christmas, Glass Onion, about the Elon Musk-style billionaire with the plot so infuriatingly convoluted you felt envious of the characters murdered in the first half-hour. And it’s the same problem I have with the whodunnit genre as a whole: always but always, character – indeed plausibility of any kind – is subordinated to the needs of the gratuitously twisty, turny, well-I-never plot.