The Grand: Critic Reviews

It's obvious that The Grand's director, Zak Penn, set out to make the Best in Show of high-stakes poker, but to raise the ante, he piles up the absurdities and zany backstories.

The Grand is in the grand tradition of Christopher Guest 'mockumentary' comedy satires: Its greatest asset is its eclectic, quirky-funny cast.

Just showing us what ex-sitcom stars and Bavarian directors do in their spare time isn't quite enough to justify The Grand, which does for poker what Best in Show did for dogs while completely avoiding any jokes about poker-playing canines.

Put Herzog at the same table as Hines, Harrelson, Parnell, Cross, and Farina, and poker on film starts to look a lot less dull. Imagine what they could do with Monopoly.

Even if you know nothing at all about the game, you'd be hard-pressed to find better entertainment for such a modest entry fee.

Zak Penn's The Grand is a seesaw, but the setting -- the high-stakes poker subculture -- is remarkably fertile and the actors are a treat.

It's hard to believe that a lineup so stellar could generate so few laughs, but there it is.

The film is not much more than a gusher of oddball character sketches and ricocheting gags, but its manic pace and over-the-top inventiveness make The Grand a solid bet.

The sort of half-baked vanity project favored by the Tribeca Film Festival, Zak Penn's The Grand features a slew of recognizable faces in a fitfully funny improvised comedy.

This failure of steely intention, combined with a not quite satisfactory resolution of the fates of the characters, keeps the movie just shy of being a first-rate comedy.

The 'card flick' has usually been a standard western, drama or crime deal -- that is, until a pack of mostly veteran comic actors tried their hand at improvising, Christopher Guest-style, in the highly amusing The Grand.

As my idol Joe Bob Briggs used to say, that's an awful lot of plot getting in the way of the story.

Decided that sticking to the formula was more important than letting something organic or crazy happen.

A collection of sketches does not add up to a drama in this case

For every scene that goes nowhere -- and there are more than a few -- there's some comedy gold lurking around the corner.

THE GRAND has it's funny moments, and there were some things that I laughed hard at, but it's 104 minutes, which is much too long to be consistently funny.

The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.

The Grand gambles on its cast's improv chops but comes up only with a pair of sevens.

Without Cheryl Hines or Chris Parnell, The Grand would be a fast fold.

There's nothing under the surface of the comedy, although it's rarely less than amusing and frequently hilarious.

The new film The Grand should have been called Werner Herzog Steals the Show because that's precisely what he does in this mockumentary about a poker tournament.

One-eyed Jack Faro's chances aren't assured but low odds amusement is yours for the buy-in. Satire has been dealt better hands with less bluff.

Worth a gamble.

There may be too many cooks here, too many TV stars trying to make an impression in a relatively high-profile independent film, but they connect just often enough to leave you smiling.

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.