Bruce Boxleitner

  • Kenny Rogers as The Gambler (1980)

    Kenny Rogers as The Gambler (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) Whenever you hear someone bemoaning how Hollywood is making movies out of silly things (a comic book, a board game, a toy), gently remind them that The Gambler was adapted from a song popularized by Kenny Rogers, and that it’s not a bad movie at all — in fact, it’s a great portrayal of Rogers at his most charismatic. Nearly everyone of a certain age can hum the chorus of the song: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, Know when to walk away, know when to run,” and those who can’t surely will after seeing the film, because it’s still a first-grade earworm. Much of the film follows the song, as a naïve card shark (Bruce Boxleitner) is mentored by an older man (Rogers) who has seen it all. The younger man simply wants to play cards for money; the older is on a mission to reunite with his ex-wife and his estranged son. Much of the story takes place aboard a train or near its stops, giving some implicit forward momentum to the story. Even those who aren’t fans of westerns will appreciate how the script uses tropes of the genre in a way adapted from card-playing, with bluff and odds-counting being integral parts of the shootouts and dramatic scenes peppering the story. Still, the best asset of The Gambler remains Rogers himself, immensely likable with his calm jaded demeanour, soft-spoken voice and glorious beard. He’s not a good actor (the edges of his acting talent wear thin in some scenes) but you can’t help but like him. It’s a shame that The Gambler, which features some surprising cinematography for a made-for-TV production, was shown on TCM in such poor image quality that some sequences seem to come from a sepia-toned movie. Still, that’s not quite enough to make anyone walk away from a surprisingly entertaining western that cleverly weaves in the themes of its inspiration.

  • Kuffs (1992)

    Kuffs (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2019) I hope that Americans sometime realize the utterly bizarre nature of their law enforcement “system”, with its odd pockets of arcane rules and historical exemptions. So it is that I knew nothing about the San Francisco Patrol Special Police as depicted in Kuffs … and I don’t think that the film makes a very convincing case for its existence. It doesn’t help that this is a film with severe split personality problems, trying both for 1980s violent police action and for fourth-wall-breaking comedy. Christian Slater (near the height of his popularity at the time) often provides comic asides to the camera, sometimes in the middle of otherwise dark and dramatic scenes. Some sequences (talking to the camera while gagged, bleeped swearing, drugged-out sequence, visitors barging in on a shot-out apartment) approach pure slapstick, while much of the rest of the film is dull dark action undistinguishable from countless other movies. The cast can be surprising: Milla Jovovich shows up in a very early film as nothing more than “the girlfriend”, while Bruce Boxleitner is taken out early and Tony Goldwin is playing silly. While Slater does provide the charisma that his role requires, much of the film seems to succeed accidentally rather than by design, so inconsistently does it whiplash from comedy to drama. It really does nothing good to the image to the private law enforcers of San Francisco to be portrayed like Kuffs does.