MOVIE REVIEW: 'Lucky You'


Longer version of a review in today's Oregonian....




If anyone could take a movie about a bunch of jerks who play poker and make it interesting, it should be Curtis Hanson. Or rather, it should have been.

Hanson has earned a reputation as a straight-shooting director (and occasional writer) who does smart work with literary adaptations ("L.A. Confidential," "The Wonder Boys"). But he also has a real gift for taking B-grade genre material and boosting its IQ beyond all theoretical limits -- whether it's a come-from-behind rap drama ("8 Mile"), a thriller ("The River Wild") or even a straight-up chick flick ("In Her Shoes").

"Lucky You" would seem, then, to be a good fit for Hanson. It's a family drama/sports movie, cut vaguely from the Ron Shelton mold, about a pro poker player named Huck (Eric Bana) who's trying to buy into the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

But Huck is hampered by his demons. He wins massive piles of chips, then blows them on risky bets. He's easily spooked by his father (Robert Duvall), a two-time world poker champ who abandoned Huck's mother. And when Huck finally meets a really nice girl from Bakersfield (Drew Barrymore), he promptly "borrows" her traveler's checks to finance his game.

It's decent raw material -- if romantic angst, daddy issues and too many shots of dealers turning over playing cards are your thing. So why does Hanson, for the first time in his post-"Confidential" career, fail to make character or story crackle?

The problems are fourfold:

• First and least important, Hanson's plainspoken shooting style, combined with a script full of guys sitting at tables, makes for a low-energy film experience.

• Second, Bana and Barrymore (who have each crackled elsewhere) are unbelievable charisma-vacuums here. Bana's prettiness and Barrymore's blandness commingle like wind whipping against a tree stump.

• Third, Huck is too reckless and unpleasant and humorless and thievery-prone to trust or root for -- which would be fine, if…

• … fourth, Huck's emotional journey (and the film's life lessons) weren't constantly summed up with lame, way-too-on-the-nose poker metaphors like, "You play cards the way you should live your life and you live your life the way you should play cards," &tc. ad nauseam.

Oh, there are solid bits here and there. I like that Hanson shows us rumpled corners of Vegas you won't find in an "Ocean" movie. There are some nicely weird character cameos by the likes of Robert Downey Jr. The movie opens and closes fairly well. And there's an extended scene in the middle where Bana and Duvall sum up their relationship over a drugstore card game that would actually make a pretty decent short film all by itself. But it's just not enough to overcome the larger dreariness.
_____

C; 124 minutes; rated PG-13 for some language and sexual humor.

Lucky You (The Oregonian, May 4, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - May 4, 2007 at 08:20 AM        

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