CinePhillyist Reviews... Lucky You

I don't know nearly as much about poker as I thought I did. Apparently, watching the occasional episode of Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo does not make you an expert. Also, there seem to be more kinds of poker than Texas Hold 'Em and Five Card Stud. Who knew? (Answer: the producers of Lucky You.) That being said, I don't think I missed out on too much in Lucky You because of my lack of poker knowledge, although I did sometimes find myself trying to figure out why one hand might beat another instead of paying attention to the plot.

Not that there was much of one. Contrary to what the film's marketing department would have you believe, Lucky You is not a romantic comedy. Sure, there are moments of comedy, and moments of romance, but Lucky You is mostly about a young poker player named Huck (Eric Bana) whose biggest problem in life isn't whether he wins or loses, it's his relationship with his father (Robert Duvall), who is also a professional poker player. Not too complex a story, so to make the movie appealing to the ladies, the filmmakers added an un-compelling love story between Huck and Billie (Drew Barrymore), a lounge singer who, well, really can't sing. (Note to filmmakers: Drew Barrymore was the only actor in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You who didn't do her own singing. The only one. So why the hell did you make her sing in the movie if you weren't going to explain in the script that she's not supposed to be good? Provided that that's your actual intent. If she was supposed to be good, you should have dubbed her, like Woody did.) Bana and Barrymore have very little chemistry when they're supposed to be adorable, and are, in fact, much more believable when they quarrel. Bana does far better in his scenes with Duvall, but that might be because Duvall steals them completely. One monologue, delivered in a diner, about losing a hand that really seemed to be a sure thing, was especially engaging.

The film seems to feature, well, just about every actor who was in Las Vegas during the film's shooting (Robert Downey, Jr., Debra Messing, Jean Smart, even Horatio Sanz), which would have worked if the film was funnier (a la the random cameos in every Steve Carrell or Will Ferrell comedy), or if their characters were better fleshed-out, but instead, the scenes-with-stars feel like enormous wastes of some pretty great Hollywood talent (Downey, for instance, is in the film for less than three minutes, but he played a character who was probably more interesting than anyone else in the whole movie). It's entirely possible that the film was originally supposed to be much longer and feature more time with all of these actors, but because it's not and it doesn't, it ends up being little more than an annoying conceit.

Lucky You runs about two hours, of which a good thirty minutes or more is shot at the poker table. It's here where the film is actually most interesting, not just because poker is the new black, but because, from a technical level, these scenes are perfect. Live hands of poker are being dealt and played, but the results are scripted. As such, some poor production assistant had to count the cards in every deck and order them so that the players/actors were actually given the cards they were supposed to have on every deal. It's actually quite impressive, and beyond that, watching the game being played is the only time during the film that there's really any level of compelling suspense. Unfortunately, once you've seen the film once, you know who gets which cards, and there's no compelling reason to watch the movie again.

Photo by Merie W. Wallace, SMPSP, via Warner Brothers.