K-SCORE: 37
Director: Richard Donner
Based on: Maverick by Roy Huggins
Starring: Mel Gibson, James Garner, Jodie Foster, James Coburn
Spoiler Level: Major
Hm. Campier and stupider than I remember.
So, in Maverick, Maverick spends three-quarters of the film trying to acquire the last couple thousand dollars in order to enter into a poker tournament. To do this, he goes on a carriage ride with an old man who dies of natural causes while driving, he counter-robs some drunk bandits only to return the money they stole to a group of religious settlers, and he pretends to be a Native American getting hunted by a sicko that wants to hunt the most dangerous game. Yet none of this matters. The only thing that matters for financing his entry is his ability to lie to the idiot manhunter and extort some six-thousand dollars from him.
Then for most of the last quarter of the film they play poker. Twenty-five entrants in the tournament spread over four tables. Conveniently, all four of the characters you know are spread across different tables. Even more convenient, they’re all the winners of their respective first-round games, so the final match features only characters you’ve followed so far. Then things get even more… unlikely… when, in a hand of 5-card draw, Angel has a straight-flush, the commodore has four 8s, and Maverick has a royal flush with spades. There’s no bluffing, no skill to the betting, just good luck for Maverick on the scale of lottery-winning and bad luck for the commodore and Angel on the scale of getting struck by lightning. And then, for the second time, the film decides to make everything you’ve watched so far obsolete! Coop simply steals the prize money and rides off in a boat, which he was planning on doing regardless of the winner of the tournament.
The final few minutes reveal that Coop is Maverick’s father and feature betrayal on betrayal on betrayal, whereby the final destination of the money is resolved because Maverick is clever enough to hide it in his boot. That’s right, the fate of the $500,000 at the heart of the entire film is determined using the same method that people use when they go swimming in the ocean. Hide your money in your shoe. To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “I know, I’ll slide it all the way up to the toe. They’ll never find it then. That’s not how they do it. They check the heel and then they move on.”
Maverick is a poker movie where the poker doesn’t matter, and a wild-west bandit movie where even the gunfights don’t matter. It’s a comedy that was funnier to me when I was ten, but it’s still occasionally amusing and it never takes itself that seriously, which is a plus given how poorly plotted it is. Perhaps it means more to people who have a familiarity with the source material.