Review of Finder's Fee (2001) by Anthony B — 22 Mar 2018

Gets 2 stars on a technicality because it is watchable... like a car wreck is watchable. Finder's Fee is a lame, textbook indie that is as harmless as it is vanilla and as vanilla as it is unremarkable.

Not until the "finale" when everything goes wildly wrong tonally to the extent that you can envision the screenwriter scrambling to finish his script before he completely loses interest, does Finder's Fee become entertaining.

.. on a technicality. Minus the lead who I of course recognized as Amanda Beckett's cousin from Can't Hardy Wait ( a far better film) the cast is solid. Mathew Lillard is basically a human cartoon character, which is always fun, Ryan Reynolds (in his nobody years) is likable like all Canadians, they even got that Irish guy whose name I can't remember to play an endearing wussy, and James Earl Jones rounds out the numbers adequately given his age.

Unfortunately, there were several moments when Mr. Jones was struggling to breathe so much he sounded a little like Darth Vader. I joke but it was actually pretty depressing. I went into this film expecting a cheap Rounders knockoff but for a story that revolves around playing cards, Finder's Fee has nothing to do with the game of Poker, probably because filmmaker Jeff Probst knows as much about Poker as he does filmmaking, which isn't nearly as much as he knows about hosting reality TV shows like Survivor.

.. yeah, look it up. lol.