Stream It Or Skip It?

This week on Please Don’t Make Me Invoke Mortdecai Theatre is Ballad of a Small Player (now on Netflix), a gruesomely overstylized mess of a film directed by Edward Berger, starring Colin Farrell as a bottom-of-the-slopbucket gambling addict and Tilda Swinton as a forgettable whatever of a character, which is something I thought I’d never-in-a-million-years see. That this thing is such a milieu is a surprise considering Berger’s previous two films, the gripping 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and the visually arresting actorly showcase that was 2024’s Conclave, earned big piles of Oscar noms. Small Player’s literary origin – it’s based on Lawrence Osborne’s acclaimed 2014 novel – is the only thing it has in common with those two films, both of which were quite excellent. Which is to say, there’s some real what-the-hell energy with this strange, eyeball-scorching bewilderment of a movie.   

The Gist: Lord Doyle (Farrell) is wet. Constantly. He wakes up wet, goes to bed wet, walks around all day wet. Beads on his forehead dribble down to his eyebrows which redirect them to become a slickness on the cheeks, and I haven’t even gotten around to describing his neck yet. The dampness seems to be a (surely pungent) melange of cold sweat, meat sweats, booze sweat, flop sweat, South Pacific humidity and piss-warm evening rain. The point being, I believe, is if he ever dried out, he’d be less slippery. It’s what you call a metaphor.

He dresses posh in velvet jackets, with a mustache that only John Waters should wear and a pair of yellow “good luck” gloves that obviously don’t always work. His fancy hotel room is wrecked with bottles and plates and glasses and crumpled napkins and tossed bits of clothing, all signifiers that the guy is a Troubled Movie Character, Gambling Edition, just like empty beer cans and half-eaten cartons of Chinese food strewn around a spartan apartment tell us that a Troubled Movie Character is a Sad Divorced Cop, Estranged From His Daughter. Shocker, Lord Doyle is not his real name. He’s an Englishman on the lam in Macau for reasons to be revealed later. He pretends to be big time but is in fact a pathetic man who occasionally envisions himself stepping off the top of a tall building. He’s got PROBLEMS.

“Here, I barely exist,” he says in voiceover. “Here, I can be whoever I want to be.” But is Lord Doyle really who he wants to be? A desperate and isolated shell of a human who owes $352k to the hotel (OK, that’s only Hong Kong dollars, which is 40-some grand) and rides the extreme social-emotional-financial rollercoaster of gambling at baccarat? The locals call him a “gwailo,” which translates to “foreign ghost” and seems to be pejorative, similar to Mexicans calling White folk “gringo.” And that’s how he defines himself, too, which makes him a real treat to be around. We will spend 100 minutes with this guy and will learn nearly nothing about him except that he binge-gambles – and binge-eats in a hideously disgusting manner – and lives for the all-too-brief boom while mostly existing miserably in a state of anxious bust. But at this point, the boom doesn’t seem to be nearly enough for his bottomless appetites.

Lord Doyle meets two women who might almost shake him from his gross little rut. Cynthia (Swinton) is a private investigator/bland plot device sent by interested parties back in England to collect debts from our protag, but hey, at least she dresses halfway like a clown. And Dao Ming (Fala Chen) is a casino hostess who offers shlubs like Lord Doyle loans so they can lose even more money at the card tables. He defends Dao Ming during a confrontation, and takes a punch for his trouble, and that’s apparently enough for her to, I dunno, like the guy? Take a shine to him? Feel sorry for him? He seems impossible to love, his every twitch and mannerism screaming DANGER, DO NOT ENGAGE. “You and I are the same,” she says, and that’s a granddaddy of a whopper of a whale that you and I will never swallow, because unlike Lord Doyle, she doesn’t regularly crumple to the floor during panic attacks or look like the object of the movie’s clearly out-of-control spritzing specialist, who almost certainly got paid per squirt. Dao Ming babe, you’re just far too dry for this guy. He’s a fish out of water, damp and gasping and flopping around helplessly, and there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Here it is: Ballad of a Small Player takes the gambling misfortunes/adventures of Owning Mahowny or The Card Counter, borrows rudimentary structure and dark themes from Leaving Las Vegas and makes its main character a sopping variation of Mortdecai.

Performance Worth Watching: Small Player finds Farrell wearing droplets of moisture like he wore prosthetics in The Batman and The Penguin. You can’t help but appreciate his efforts even when he’s handed a nothing of a cliche of a character surrounded by visual excess.

Memorable Dialogue: A late-night exchange takes a stab at profundity: 

Dao Ming: Have you heard of the Buddhist hell?

Doyle: Naraka. 

Dao Ming: The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts is for people driven by greed. They have huge mouths and thin necks, and no matter how much they eat or drink, they can never be satisfied.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So. How invested are we in Lord Doyle’s well-being, which is tied to him paying off considerable debts? The better question might be, why does Ballad of a Small Player struggle so mightily to communicate basic notions of plot and character with any clarity? The film could be a cautionary tale about narratives with ethically questionable protagonists; it fails to establish Lord Doyle as anything more than a bundle of tics and bad decisions, and as we attempt to discern whether the character is worth redemption – or even our baseline interest – he falls into the Who Cares Crevasse, with nary a twig or crumbling handhold to rescue him from our indifference. 

Berger compensates for his protagonist’s lack of charisma – again, not Farrell’s fault – by directing the living shit out of the movie. The overstated squeak of Doyle’s gloves as he bends the edge of a playing card to get a peek at it is presented as an audio/visual/tactile fetish, an entry point for his glistening skin and, eventually, the putrid manner in which he slurps and masticates a room-service feast. Everything about the production is excessive – the sound design, the intrusive score, the quasi-phantasmagorical visuals. We get it: With their veneer of glamour covering emotional vacuums, places like Macau and Vegas are ideal settings for flimsy losers like Doyle to flame and/or peter out with a big bang or a series of sad little whimpers. The setting here is opulent, glitzy, bursting with color; on one hand, it’s impressive, and on the other, it’s pointlessly extravagant. Berger doesn’t seem to be capturing the setting to create a mood or feeling, instead exploiting its tacky beauty for his own indulgence.

The unbridled overkill of this thing only brings further attention to a plot that muddles its way to Doyle’s One Big Score, one last all-or-nothing hand of baccarat that even he doesn’t believe will solve his problems, which are deeper than just paying off people who want to imprison, beat up or maybe even kill him. I mean, he apparently wants to kill himself first, so nothing scares him. The nihilistic core of the character ends up being the narrative focus; there was a point, after sifting through the half-assed Dao Ming/Doyle dynamic, grazed-against implications of supernatural hoodoo and the barely realized shadows of Lynchian dreamstates, when I asked myself whether this was a love story or a thriller or a character study, and I couldn’t tell. Berger fills our eyeballs with so much stuff that he seems to have forgotten about his ideas and characters, who are reflections of moral vacancy, hopelessness and cynicism. Our only hope for this movie is that it’s over soon – and ultimately, we have control over that. 

Our Call: Ballad of a Small Player is an empty wank of a movie. I am significantly annoyed. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.