4 Dogs Playing Poker
(1999)
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Four friends get in over their heads when they try to make a bigtime heist. They pull off the job, stealing a small, but priceless sculpture. Immediately, the sculpture is missing and the novice group of thieves find themselves burdened with a debt to a crime lord that they cannot pay. Their desperate attempt at saving at least some of their lives is to have each member of the crew take out a $1 million life insurance policy. Each then draws a playing card that will designate whose life is to be spared in order to pay the crime boss and allow the others to live. |
Four art thieves lose their stolen $1 million object before they can deliver it to bad guy Forest Whitaker, so they decide to insure each of themselves for a million, then secretly assign one of their number to kill one of the others in order to collect the insurance and pay their debt — except no one will know who is to be the killer and who the victim. Like the British Shallow Grave, this gets interesting when they turn against and suspect each other. While the script is quite weak there are fun performances from a cast that includes Stacy Edwards (In the Company of Men), Balthazar Getty, Olivia Williams, Tim Curry and former 007 George Lazenby.