Colin Farrell’s gambling ghost story is no sure bet

The first half of “Ballad of a Small Player,” a mysterious psychodrama starring Colin Farrell, is a sexy, hyperactive, high-roller’s “Catch Me If You Can.”

As for the much worse second half, well, it can’t.

The uneven film from “Conclave” director Edward Berger takes a hard turn into spiritual and literary territory, which makes sense since it’s based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne.

Yet it behooves films to not behave like books. 

Cinematically, while often enjoyable and always a stunner to look at, “Small Player”’s story progresses strangely. Phenomenally entertaining, zippy antics at the start quickly careen into a “betting is bad” morality crisis involving a ghost.  

A twist ending that’s meant to be as shocking as “The Sixth Sense” is a mostly unsurprising head-scratcher. 

Thus, the movie’s identity — fun puzzle or spooky “Tell-Tale Heart”? — is ultimately hazy as that of its enigmatic main character Lord Doyle.

Farrell’s Doyle is a charming sleaze bag. He’s a smoking-jacket-clad gambler who lives in glittering Macau, China, a kind of Vegas on steroids. Doyle has accumulated staggering debts and is about to be booted from his luxe hotel for nonpayment. Cycling through a Rolodex of names and accents, there’s an air of Anna Delvey about him. 

Down-on-his-luck Doyle bops around town — spectacular, as if a sparkler became a city — borrowing on credit and rolling the dice to win back what he owes. 

At times it’s hard to believe anyone is falling for his flamboyant con, but money talks. And setting the tale in China, with its different norms and customs, lends some credulity to a man so absurd being readily accepted by everybody around him.

Farrell excels at characters with harmful vices and manages to make them extraordinarily likable with his boyish good nature. Doyle is a bad guy, no doubt about it, but we’re entranced by his quest all the same. 

To a point, anyway.

Not so smitten is Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton), a British private investigator whose client in the UK Doyle cheated out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. He’s on the run. She’s in China chasing him down.  

Even for her, Swinton’s performance is Tilda Swinton Concentrate. Eat your heart out, Wes Anderson. Berger’s film is grandly scaled, but the actress is nonetheless too cartoony to naturally fit into it.      

Doyle forms a flirty bond with Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a casino manager who gives him the benefit of the doubt against her best judgement. 

And he’s visited by his friend Adrian (Alex Jennings), who’s somehow even slipperier than he is.

Really, “Small Player” is a great movie until it abruptly isn’t.

Berger, as ever, is an ambitious director. His “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave” were similarly transporting, if not diverting, expressions of immensity.

Visually here that still holds true. Narratively not so much.  

Lord Doyle’s race to gather cash, and his descent into pseudo-madness in pursuit, just doesn’t match the force of a conniving papal election or the brutal realities of a World War I battlefield.  

I liked it well enough. But in this gifted filmmaker’s oeuvre, his latest is a small player, indeed.