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Billed as a parallel to "Field of Dreams," this flick doesn't nearly stack up. The players seem more in pain than committed to the plot, the direction/editing is flabby, and Costner seems sort of "over it." I love major league baseball, but this ain't it.

Was surprised as I read previous reader comments that nobody is recognizing this movie as a blatant knock-off of the earlier, brilliant, "The Hustler," with poker replacing pool as the less than reputable sport in question. Sure, there were a few asides not paralleled in the pool movie, but very few.

Furthermore, anyone who plays serious poker (as in to win money) will quickly recognize the producers as non-poker players. Poker is about making poor or marginal hands win against better ones through guile and bluffing, not about winning (or losing) with an Ace-high flush facing an Ace-high straight flush (a once in a poker player's lifetime hand). Really!

That said, the stellar cast (whom I assure you were all aware of the point I've just made) collaborated to make this a not great but watchable movie. How could any film with Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Annie Margaret, Edgar Robinson, and Karl Malden not be absorbing, whatever its subject. If you didn't see "The Hustler," or didn't get this film as derivative of that one, and if you don't take poker very seriously, you'll love this movie. If your answers to all those are, "Yes, I did," you'll still like it for the stars and the characters.

Robert Waller's novel wasn't literature, but it was a good read and superb material for a terrific romantic movie. But Eastwood's choice of himself as Kincaid and Streep as Francesca were almost as bad as the polyglot of actors who portrayed her children (except that they were inexperienced actors apart from being miscast). If you really liked the book/story, picture this for the movie: Sam Elliot as Kincaid and Katie Capshaw as Francesca. If you can't picture it, check out the earlier TV film, a modern romantic western, "The Quick and the Dead" (1987, I think), in which Elliot and Capshaw paired in lead roles. Pure love chemistry. Add a little subtlety (and teach Elliot to handle a Nikon camera properly, which Eastwood neglected to learn), and we'd have had a great, instead of a good, flick.