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Written by Roger Moore, McClatchy-Tribune
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Wednesday, 02 May 2007 |
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LUCKY YOU
2 stars (out of 5)
Cast: Eric Bana, Robert Duvall, Drew Barrymore, Debra Messing, Charles Martin Smith
Director: Curtis Hanson
Running time: 2 hours
Industry rating: PG-13 for some language and sexual humor
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A "poker face" is a blank expression designed to hide inner feeling. It's the very antithesis of "acting," where we want to see hints of emotion, helping us to build empathy with an actor playing a character on the big screen.
That's one huge reason "Lucky You" fails as a movie. This card-contest romance has the deck stacked against it from the start, as director Curtis Hanson fills the screen with actors he doesn't want to emote and fills in the spaces between the professional emoters with real poker players, grizzled vets of the felt who've spent decades polishing their poker faces.
They're boring. They can't act. And to a man — or woman — they're just plain unattractive. You try making a living avoiding the sun and staying up for days and days at a time, you'd look like 40 bad miles of Vegas strip, too.
"Lucky You" gives us the perpetually poker-faced Eric Bana as a moody Vegas card sharp who joins games with little cash, cunningly and craftily builds his pot, and always blows it all on some emotional "gut" guess. He's the son of a famous card player (Robert Duvall) who walked out on his family when the gambling addiction took over, a grown man living in the shadow of a two-time World Series of Poker champ.
Father and son don't get along, though Bana's underplaying (he's one of those sucks-in-his-cheeks-to-display-inner-turmoil actors) and Duvall's genial egoism don't really make much of that. Dad's still anxious to mix it up at the tables with his kid, or to pass on advice.
Your problem, he tells the boy he cruelly named "Huck" at birth, "is that you play cards the way you should live your life, and lead your life the way you ought to play cards."
If Huck can decode that fortune cookie, he might just escape the endless pawn shop visits and have a shot with the gullible lounge singer, Billie (Drew Barrymore, sweet as ever) he has just met. But first, he has to use her, bed her, betray and steal from her. And she, of course, has to come back for more. He's irresistible. Huck has no job, no money, never sleeps, gambles on everything and anything and only has eyes for that $10,000 stake he needs to get into 2003's World Series of Poker.
"Lucky You," in some misguided attempt to capture what the World Series and Vegas were like before Texas Hold'em became a fad, rolls back the clock a few years — not enough to make a difference, not enough to even mention.
The movie has these little moments of background color that are better than anything in that central "Gotta get into the BIG tourney" storyline. The sense of a gambling "industry town" is vivid, with colorful characters betting on things like whether a guy will get breast implants or live in a men's room for six months. A "Tin Cup" reverie sends Huck on a five-mile run followed by 18 holes of golf in which he has to shoot a 78 and complete the whole task in under three hours for a bet. Robert Downey Jr. is a call-juggling 900 number advice-line "expert" who keeps six cell phones going on speakerphone at once, dispensing worthless wisdom and keeping suckers on the costly line for a few minutes longer. He has one scene.
Barrymore doesn't click with Bana, partly because she's in another league as an actress. Her one scene with the great Duvall is her best in the movie. If you haven't guessed why Bana's "The Hulk" didn't work and why he was replaced as the character, "Lucky You" spells it out for you. He's dull.
Director Hanson may never make another movie as powerful and atmospheric as "L.A. Confidential," and with "Lucky You," he doesn't even try. He films the incessant card games in the most pedestrian style, over-lights everything and hires wonderful character actors to player poker "characters" (Jean Smart, among them) and gives them nothing to do. The real poker players stand out like relatives of the producer. Little of their ESPN "charisma" shines through.
Hanson doesn't let enough of the seedy side of this TV-ready game show, doesn't tell a story that's any sort of poker morality play. The whole house of cards collapses into an agreeable sort of predictability.
You'd think people making a movie about card players would have memorized Kenny Rogers' classic "The Gambler," and taken its lessons to heart. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away.
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