Lucky You

(I just had to say that before anyone else!)

I don't know anything about poker, but I enjoyed this film all right.

The people in the audience who do understand the game were getting a lot more out of it than I did. They were oohing and ahhing and tensing up like they were at a real poker tournament.

I'm surprised Drew Barrymore took a supporting role like this. She's good and lovely as always (how come she still looks 20?), but doesn't get enough to do. Robert Downey Jr and Jean Smart are also woefully underused.

The film really belongs to Eric Bana and Robert Duvall. Eric is handsome and solid. And it's a real treat to watch an old pro like Duvall.

It's only a slight tale, but a pretty good one. I could tell from one of the first scenes how it was going to wind up. Hey, maybe I should take up poker.

Only the most die-hard poker fans will find much to cheer about in "Lucky You," a Freudian drama set in the high-stakes world of the Vegas strip.

Eric Bana ("Munich") and Robert Duvall star as Huck and L.C. Cheever, two world-class poker players with many unresolved father/son issues between them. Huck resents the fact that he's had to live virtually all his adult life in the shadow of his famous father who, with his constant carousing, stealing and gambling, made life a living hell for Huck's mother virtually till the day she died. What Huck doesn't realize - and this is where Doctor Freud comes in - is that he is pretty much following in his father's footsteps both in his choice of profession and his relations with women. Meanwhile, L.C. hangs out around the casinos and coffee shops of the city trying to reconcile with his boy, while at the same time, doling out unasked-for advice about how the young man should be living his life both at and away from the poker table. Drew Barrymore completes the cast as Billie Offer, a young, morally upright ingénue from Bakersfield who has come to Sin City to begin her career as a singer and who winds up falling under the spell of the ethically-challenged Huck. Or could it be that the beatific Billie is really an angel of the Lord come to lead the iniquitous Huck out of this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah?

The scenes between Bana and Barrymore are probably the best in the film and one wishes that more time would have been spent developing that relationship instead of sitting around the poker table. For whenever the story moves into the casino, the movie stops dead in its tracks, proving once again that poker, by its very nature, makes for one of the least compelling sports ever to be depicted on film. Anyone without a thorough working knowledge of the ins and outs of Texas Hold'em, in particular, is going to find himself lost in all the arcane trivia of the poker-playing scenes (which take up quite a large chunk of the movie's overall running time, I might add). Even worse is the fact that the father/son angle is so clichéd and hackneyed at this point that even actors of the caliber of Bana and Duvall (and they are both excellent) can't be expected to really pull it off.

There are some quality elements in "Lucky You." Director Curtis Hanson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth, proves yet again - as he did in "LA Confidential" and "8 Mile" - that he knows how to extract the essence of a locale to build atmosphere and mood. Moreover, the interactions between Huck and Billie are often flavorful and intriguing (which is more than can be said for those between Huck and his dad). The performances are uniformly impressive, with Barrymore, in particular, showing a bit more range here than she has in most of her previous roles.

Hanson has populated his film with a number of real life poker playing celebrities, which may be of interest to the aficionados but won't mean much to the rest of us. Sad to say, but the lackluster "Lucky You" is unlikely to appeal to anyone not already passionate about professional poker - and unlikely to garner the sport itself many new fans.

As far as playing or watching poker on television, I can take it or leave it, and I enjoyed this movie.... so I can imagine poker fans will really LOVE this film. It gives justice to their "sport" with realistic hands, playing, situations and attitudes.

Often, I thought something hokey was going to happen, something predictable but rarely did that occur in this film. You really never knew what was going to happen and suspense builds for a number of gambling scenes. I hesitate to say more for fear of spoiling anything. Suffice to say, the gambling scenes in here were very realistic. I know what from the behind-the- scenes bonus features in which a number of real-life professional players commented on that fact.

The film follows a father-and-son team (Eric Bana and Robert Duvall playing "Huck" and "L.C. Cheever") with a small romance sub-plot involving Drew Barrymore. It isn't just all about poker, although that's most of it - culminating in the World Series of Poker - but about the mentality of people who make gambling their life.

This film was far better than I figured it would be, and was rewarding in the end without being predictable. It was fairly low-key, too, in the profanity and sex department, but kids would be bored with this film, anyway.

This movie will mainly attract card players, I'm afraid, and that's too bad because it offers a lot more than that. The movie got better as it went along and wound up a good two hours of entertainment.

If gambling and poker interests you, then you will love this film. Otherwise, it's too long and in some parts boring because there are so many long card playing scenes. Did the movie have to show so many hands of poker being played for us to follow the story? Eric Bana plays a gambler who wins some but loses a lot. His father, Robert Duval, is a world famous gambler. Duval is fabulous as usual in his role. Drew Barrymore plays the girl Bana pursues. He "borrows" money from her and gets in the dog house but alls well in the end. There are a few funny parts where his friend sets up silly wagers. Like staying in a bathroom and the whole run/golf bet. The climax is the world poker tournament and whether or not Bana can win it.

FINAL VERDICT: I like the actors in this, but I don't know anything about poker, so didn't follow that part with the checking and table tapping. A little too much of the technical stuff. The card playing should have been shorter. But I still recommend it if you like any of the actors.

No movie in recent memory has sent me more mixed pre-release signals than Lucky You. The film is directed and co-written by Curtis Hanson, who has made many films I've admired in the past including 8 Mile and L.A. Confidential. The screenplay was also co-written by Eric Roth, the screenwriter of The Insider and Munich. And it features three very likable actors in lead roles, specifically Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, and Robert Duvall. These signs should have filled me with confidence, but there was also the knowledge nagging at me that the film had been sitting on the studio's shelf for almost two years, and had been shuffled through numerous release dates. Now that I've seen the film, I can say that the film is certainly not all bad, but is nowhere near what it should be given the talent both on and behind the camera.

The film is set in the high stakes world of professional gambling in Las Vegas. We follow a man named Huck Cheever (Eric Bana), who could be one of the best players in the game, but he is compulsive and often loses as much as he wins. His estranged father L.C. (Robert Duvall) is also a professional player on the circuit, and it doesn't make things any easier for Huck. While trying to gather the money needed to participate in the World Series Poker Championship, he happens to meet a sweet young newcomer to Vegas named Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore). Billie's a singer at a local bar and knows nothing about gambling, but when she starts to get attached to Huck, she can see the compulsiveness that he cannot. This begins a rocky on-again off-again relationship between the two where Huck will have to determine what is truly important in his life.

Most of the time while I was watching Lucky You, I felt like I was watching an advertisement for the Las Vegas tourism board, or perhaps one of those professional Poker games you sometimes see on TV. That's because the film's narrative is hardly there at all, and a vast majority of the film is devoted to the game itself. The rules are explained early on when Billie sits down with Huck to watch him play in one scene, and then the movie takes off with one game sequence after another. I'm sure there's an audience out there who finds this thrilling, but I personally never got into Poker games, and found my interest somewhat waning as the film went on. To be fair, the film's climactic game at the Championship can be pretty tense at times, but the numerous smaller games that take up the film's two hour plus running time just never build to much. Because the movie is so heavily concentrated on gaming, the story and the characters never come across as interesting as they should be. Huck and Billie never get developed beyond their most basic traits, and never even come across as a couple we can get behind. Huck's seeming inability to listen or reason made me wonder what Billie was thinking each time she hooked back up with him. I suppose this is supposed to be about a love story about two people who never learn. I can certainly see a good movie being made off of that story, but this movie never lets us get close to them, so we don't feel anything whether they are together or apart.

That's not to say the movie is all bad. Lucky You is handsomely shot, and the cinematography by Peter Deming really captures the excitement and thrill of Vegas quite well. And even if the Poker game sequences get somewhat tedious, they are filmed well and manage to keep things moving. There are also some good performances on display. The three main leads are all strong, particularly Eric Bana and Robert Duvall during their scenes together. The father-son relationship they share often felt more genuine than the romance Bana shares with Barrymore. There are also a number of enjoyable supporting roles featuring many of Huck's friends, who are equally compulsive with their gambling. One memorable cameo features Robert Downey Jr as a man who runs multiple 1-900 number services at the same time, as he switches back and forth between a self-run depression helpline and a relationship counseling line. The only problem is that all of these positives are being employed by an emotionally hollow screenplay. The narrative is shaky at best, and we never get to know these characters as much as we feel we should. There is enough drama and ideas here for a compelling romantic comedy-drama, but the film never takes charge. It's too interested in its setting, and not enough in the people who inhabit that setting.

Lucky You is not quite the disaster that should have had its release delayed for so long, but at the same time, I can understand why the studio was somewhat nervous about it. Despite the big names and the romance angle, this movie is really all about professional gambling, and it speaks to a very limited audience. I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. With a screenplay that focused more on Huck and Billie, this maybe could have been an interesting story about two people who fall in love, despite the fact they're probably bad for each other. As it is, I often found myself trying to guess which hotel or casino they shot the scene I was watching in, and was thinking back on my own visit to Vegas a couple years ago. The movie brought back some fun memories, but not much else.