{"id":220361,"date":"2025-10-17T18:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T18:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/220361\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T18:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T18:17:08","slug":"ballad-of-a-small-player-review-impenetrable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/220361\/","title":{"rendered":"Ballad Of A Small Player Review \u2013 ‘Impenetrable’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Macau, a gambler down on his luck \u2014 self-titled Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) \u2014 is desperate. In attempting to pay off his debts, he attracts the attention of both a private investigator (Tilda Swinton) and Dao Ming (Fala Chen), the woman who may just provide the lifeline he covets.<\/p>\n

Edward Berger has been on a roll. After his 2022 film All Quiet On The Western Front<\/a> earned a Best Picture nomination, his follow-up, the outstanding Conclave<\/a>, did the same. But Berger won\u2019t have to worry about the pressure of a Best Picture nom this time around: his third in four years, Ballad Of A Small Player<\/a>, set in the casino capital of Macau, attempts to bring together the searing intensity of All Quiet\u2026 with the sly humor of Conclave. It achieves neither.<\/p>\n

\"Ballad<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with an unlikeable gambler as your protagonist. The world would be a poorer place if we didn\u2019t have Adam Sandler\u2019s detestable turn in Uncut Gems<\/a>. But while that film made us root for its degenerate protagonist’s success, there\u2019s no such feeling in Ballad Of A Small Player.<\/p>\n

Edward Berger\u2019s film sags under its own ambition.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to discredit Colin Farrell as said gambler, who does everything in his power to make you care about his Doyle, particularly in a deeply uncomfortable yet utterly arresting binge-eating scene. But Rowan Joff\u00e9\u2019s screenplay, adapting the unwieldy novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne, brings diminishing results, crafting a world so convoluted \u2014\u202fcomplete with a twist you can see a mile off \u2014 that it never gives you a moment to understand Doyle. There\u2019s not enough to him. Everyone else fares even worse. Giving Tilda Swinton such a paper-thin character is unforgivable.<\/p>\n

Ballad tries to balance a thoughtful ghost story with a crime caper and a high-stakes gambling narrative, which never converge in effective fashion. For a film with this much talent in front of and behind the camera, you\u2019d expect it to be a lot more interesting, but Berger\u2019s film sags under its own ambition.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, Ballad Of A Small Player is breathtaking to look at. The bright lights and larger-than-life feel of Macau are rendered exquisitely through James Friend\u2019s cinematography. The neon-drenched compositions are always inviting, and the vibrant score from Volker Bertelmann is propulsive. While it\u2019s visually dazzling, its overwrought narrative can\u2019t stick the landing.<\/p>\n

Though Farrell does great work and the film is a visual feast, Ballad Of A Small Player is an impenetrable story of redemption that\u2019s both too obvious and too baffling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Macau, a gambler down on his luck \u2014 self-titled Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) \u2014 is desperate. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-220361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}