„Now listen to me, you little Harvard turd. Lootz is all right, so he's walking out of here with everything he's got coming to him. If you touch one fucking hair on his fucking head, I'm gonna fucking wallpaper this fucking bathroom with your fucking ass, do you understand me? Muted tones, isn't that what you said, huh? Huh? I can't hear you. Wait, wait a minute. There it is. Blended in, at a subsonic level, like some kind of mantra: "Pain, pain, pain." (Shelly Kaplow/Alec Baldwin in The Cooler, r. Wayne Kramer/2003)
The Cooler: a fine addition for a minor genre of American cinema: the Las Vegas story. Not the grand gloss and glamour of Scorsese's Casino or either version of Ocean's Eleven, but small time drama like Alex Cox's The Winner, Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, even Francis Ford Coppola's musical, One from the Heart. Like those films, The Cooler plays in a minor key and is all the better for it.