Tazza: The High Rollers is a 2006 film from South Korea directed by Choi Dong-hoon.
It's a movie about gambling and card sharps. The story, set 1994-1996, focuses on a young man, Goni, who has a pretty serious gambling addiction. He plays the Korean game of "hwatu" and gets cleaned out, and worse, he was gambling with his sister's alimony money. Desperate to get it back, he gets a scythe and attempts to commit armed robbery of an illegal hwatu den. He probably would have gotten killed, except for the good will of a veteran gambler at the scene, Mr. Pyeong. Mr. Pyeong, impressed with the young man's nerve, calls off the goons who are about to murder him. He takes Goni under his wing and teaches him the secrets of hwatu, which mostly consists of how to cheat people.
Fast forward two years and Goni has become an expert card sharp, fleecing mark after mark under Mr. Pyeong's tutelage. They sometimes partner with the gorgeous Madame Jeong (Kim Hye-soo), who uses her sexiness as another tool to lure in marks. After Goni gets a nice fat bankroll, Mr. Pyeong tries to get him to go straight, but instead Goni quits him and goes into partnership with Jeong, who becomes his lover—but she has secrets of her own. Eventually, the two of them run afoul of a brutal, homicidal gangster named Agui.
Based on a popular manhwa. Followed by sequels Tazza: The Hidden Card and Tazza: One-Eyed Jack.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: The last scene shows Goni, who in the climactic sequence survived being shot in the arm and stabbed in the stomach and then falling off a train, in some legal casino by the beach somewhere, still gambling.
- An Arm and a Leg: Agui's signature move is to chop off the right hands of people who piss him off, like anyone whom he catches cheating at a game of hwatu. Goni meets a veteran gambler named One Ear who lost both his hand and his ear to Agui. Agui has Ko's hand chopped off near the climax. When Mr. Pyeong's body is found with the right hand severed, Goni assumes that Agui did it, but he is wrong.
- Answer Cut: Mr. Pyeong, telling Goni about his Honey Pot partner, says "Ever heard of the flower of gambling?" Cut to the introduction of Madame Jeong, looking hot, separating a mark from his cash.
- Betty and Veronica: Madame Jeong is the Veronica, Gori's lover, the curvaceous sexual temptress who often plays the Honey Pot in card sharp schemes. Hwa-ran is the Betty, the pretty, charming waitress who is shy about putting out but eventually becomes Gori's girlfriend. Madame Jeong is pissed off when she finds out about this.Madame Jeong: Who does she think she is? Bitch.
- Briefcase Full of Money: Several, as high rollers customarily bring their bank rolls to illicit games in briefcases.
- Call-Back: Ko Kwang-ryeol makes his acquaintance with Gori by telling him they're both from the same town, Namsan. At the end, as Ko is being hauled away to surgery in a hospital, he confesses to Gori that he's actually from Busan.
- Card Sharp: Most of the players. Indeed it seems that hwatu, with its tiny cards that are easily palmed or otherwise hidden, is tailor-made for cheating. Mr. Pyeong tutors Goni on sleight-of-hand, palming cards, and dealing from the bottom of the deck. One cheating gambler stashes hwatu cards in a hidden compartment under an ashtray. The word "Tazza" is a Korean slang term denoting a high roller, with an implication of trickery.
- Chekhov's Gun: An actual gun, a fancy revolver won off a mark. Mr. Pyeong throws it into a pond, saying that card sharps couldn't use guns. However, Madame Jeong went back and got it, as she pulls it on Agui towards the end. At the climax she shoots Goni with it.
- Con Men Hate Guns: The gang fleece a mark, and among the stuff they take from him is a valuable collector's item revolver. Mr. Pyeong promptly throws the revolver in a pond, telling the others that card sharps such as themselves should not be messing around with guns. Later, it's revealed that Madame Jeong retrieved the gun, when she pulls it on Agui, showing that she is more bloodthirsty than her mentor.
- Creator Cameo: Huh Young-man, who co-wrote the original manhwa that this film was adapted from, has a cameo as a gambler.
- Dead-Hand Shot: At the end, Madame Jeong is brought into a morgue to identify Goni's body. She does—but then the corpse's hand flops out from under the sheet as it's being pushed back in, revealing a tattooed wrist. It is actually the body of Madame Jeong's henchman and chief assassin, and she apparently misidentified it on purpose in order for Goni to be written off as dead by the police.
- Distracted by the Sexy: Mr. Pyeong and Madame Jeong actually have a signal for this when running a con. Whenever he makes a particular gesture she spreads her legs and flashes a Panty Shot at the mark, seemingly by accident, and Mr. Pyeong substitutes a card while the mark is distracted.
- Dramatic Gun Cock: Agui is molesting Madame Jeong and is seemingly about to rape her when she pulls out a gun and puts it up against his head. After she cocks the hammer he backs down.
- Fanservice Extra: The topless hooker at Madame Jeong's gambling den/whorehouse, who, after having sex with the mark, urges him to touch her breasts for luck. It's obviously a part of the system to keep the mark there until he's cleaned out.
- Flat Character: Hwa-ran, the pretty young restaurant proprietor and would-be hairdresser who becomes Goni's girlfriend. She has little to do in the story other than be eye candy and be something for Agui to kidnap so he'll have leverage over Goni.
- The Gambling Addict:
- After Goni's sister makes the odd decision to collect a large alimony payment in cash (why?) and the even more foolish decision to let Goni see where she puts it, he is unable to fight the temptation to take it and gamble with it. Goni's decision to become a card sharp under Mr. Pyeong seems motivated, after the immediate need to recover that money, by his own knowledge that he can't stop gambling so he might as well get good at it.
- Later the gang is ripping off another mark, a professor. When Goni wonders how a bespectacled teacher happens to have such a large pile of cash Madame Jeong casually explains that it's the money for his son's surgery. As the professor is leaving after getting cleaned out, Goni stops him and gives him the bulk of his cash back—only for the professor to go right back inside to gamble again.
- Handshake Refusal: Ko, another card sharp, introduces himself to Goni, extending his hand and saying they're from the same town. Goni brusquely refuses the offered hand but Kwang soon becomes his friend and sidekick anyway.
- Honey Pot: Madame Jeong does this. Sometimes it's as simple as rearranging her legs to flash her panties in an effort to distract the mark. Other times she puts in more work, like towards the end when she becomes the girlfriend of a wealthy mark and claims to have lost a lot of money at hwatu, so she can lure him into a game and take him for everything he has.
- How We Got Here: After an opening scene showing Goni and Ko pulling off a con, the story jumps back two years and shows how Goni got into the card sharp game.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: After Agui asks what Mr. Pyeong is up to, Madame Jeong says that he was found dead with his right hand severed. Gori, who never mentioned the hand-chopping, realizes that it was her, and not Agui, who had Mr. Pyeong killed.
- The Lancer: Ko Kwang-ryeol, another card sharp, becomes Goni's partner in hustling marks, and also provides comic relief.
- Lingerie Scene: Some Kim Hye-soo fanservice has her clad in a sheer nightie as she chases after Goni, trying to stop him from pursuing Agui and maybe getting killed.
- Made of Iron: Goni gets shot in the arm by Madame Jeong, then boards a train only to be greeted by her gold-toothed bodyguard, who stabs him in the gut. Goni then fights the bodyguard, and eventually they both fall off the train, and while the bodyguard is killed Goni survives that too. He's shown alive and well in the last scene, still gambling somewhere.
- The Mentor: Mr. Pyeong, who takes Gori under his wing and teaches him how to be a card sharp and how to fleece a mark.
- Parking Garage: Madame Jeong tells one of her minions to steal Gori's car, which has his whole bankroll hidden in a compartment where the spare tire should go. A horrified Gori is then shown in a parking garage, running to his parking spot, which is empty.
- The Reveal: In fact, it was not Mr. Pyeong's old enemy Agui who had him murdered, it was Madame Jeong, his former partner in crime. Her motivation for this is not explained except for her screaming "He ruined my life!" Apparently she blamed Mr. Pyeong for getting her into the Honey Pot Card Sharp business to begin with.
- Split Screen: Sometimes used in card-playing sequences, like the climactic game between Goni and Agui.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The entire movie is framed as a story that Madame Jeong is telling about Goni. At the end it's revealed that she's talking to the cops before going to identify Goni's body.
