Is Croupier really a neo-noir gambling movie?

Oh, please don't get me wrong. Croupier is still an enjoyable movie its just that I found it a bit too much of a character study and musings on luck versus a movie that really dealt with a casino caper. Its more a character study with the trappings of gambling. The lack of film-noir lighting and film-noir camera angles may give us pause to consider the "neo-noir" tag but the characters conform to a traditional film-noir role. All streets are blind alleys, all females are gin-soaked temptresses that lead a man to his doom

We all knew why the dark glasses were being worn and that the shiner was probably her artfully applied make up. We all knew there was a bandaged wrist but probably a totally uninjured one. We knew it was to be a ploy to ensnare him into aiding a lady in distress. We knew the shoe would drop that very night. And it did.

Its a duality of human nature movie (he rapes Bella but her mind consents almost as quickly as her body does) yet he winds up with her. He does get the second installment on his services for being an inside man, but he gets it from an unlikely source that he had utter contempt for. Clearly the people closing in on him in the casino are there for a reason rather than being the random chance-happenings that his writer persona imagines them to be. His persona is that of a morally and emotionally detached but superior observer of the foolishness of gamblers yet in reality he is the one who has clearly been a poor observer of those around him. And although he has observed and even raised some questions about the activities at the casino and the involvement of casino personnel, it is he who has focused on a tree or two but entirely missed seeing the forest. All the while he was having contempt for the naive gamblers, he himself was the most naive gambler.

So its bemused and detached observer being revealed as a duped patsy but not truly an unhappy victim. And this makes him identical to the sorry gamblers he has been observing all the while.