Cinematical

Those who go to Lucky You expecting a Drew Barrymore performance that is, at long last, devoid of her half human/half sunflower kitsch will be disappointed. The role is more or less straight drama, but much like Bruce Willis has a writer on standby whose job is to inject "Bruceness" into the scripts he likes, someone seems to have shoehorned in a number of cutesy Shirley Temple-style comedy moments for Drew, and downgraded the maturity level of her character to late teens, as opposed to thirty-something. At one point, sitting beside her boyfriend Huck (Eric Bana) at the poker table, she tells him that it was only right that he lost a hand, since he won the last one -- the other guy should have a turn to win. Huck is a semi-pro whose lifelong attempt to chisel a living out of cards has left him broke, and the film opens with him pawning a family heirloom for a couple hundred bucks. You get a feeling from the start that Matt Damon and Ed Norton dream of this guy.

Hopes rise early on with a funny cameo from Robert Downey Jr. as a friend of Huck who runs some kind of one-man telephone scam. He keeps several cell-phones in front of him on a table and is continually picking them up and putting them back down like three-card monte. Once he makes it clear that he has no money to lend, Huck moves on and we meet some of his less colorful friends, including a compulsive (male) gambler who agreed to get breast implants if he lost a bet, and did just that. Charles Martin Smith is an interesting choice for a mobbed-up loan shark, but the film sort of lets his character die on the vine after one sharply-written early scene with Huck. It also becomes weirdly obvious early on that the film was intended to be titled Lucky Town, since that title makes more sense and since we hear an extended sampling of Bruce Springsteen's Lucky Town. Lucky You sounds more like a lost Matthau-Lemmon comedy from the early 70s.

The film is not really about the skill or lack of skill possessed by Huck -- that element sort of changes with the needs of the script. It's primarily about his relationship with his poker legend father, L.C. Cheever, played by Robert Duvall, who arrives in the film sporting such a laughable toupee that it must be acknowledged by the other characters. Huck and L.C. had some kind of falling out many years ago and now they stare each other down in poker rooms, engage in on-the-fly showdown games at diners and trade the occasional cutting remark about "mom," as if we're supposed to care. Duvall is usually fun to watch, but the role feels a little too inside his comfort zone -- there's a sense that we're just watching Duvall be Duvall for most of his scenes, not stretching to give us something new. As for Bana, his character never gives off the vibes of someone who is either reckless or a math prodigy or any of other characteristics you'd think would fit a gifted poker player.

There's very little story to speak of, except that Huck improbably gets himself roped into the World Series of Poker and, as you might expect, manages to fend off the competition all the way to the final table, where he will eventually be staring down a handful of players including dear old Dad. In the meantime, he manages to exhibit some really outrageous behavior towards Barrymore's character, including steal money right out of her purse at one point. What kind of woman would forgive some guy she just met for doing that? It's not 'bad boyfriend' behavior -- it's criminal and crazy. Even after that happened, I expected there would have to be some kind of reconciliation between the two characters, since the movie was only half over, but I assumed that Curtis Hanson would have something good up his sleeve -- my bad. The scene is just one of many tepid "how could you do this to me?" "because I'm a jerk" scenes the movie cycles through repeatedly with low energy and poor development at the scripting level.

I did get a kick out of one scene, where in a pathetic attempt to win money from one of his friends who will bet on anything, Huck charges through a running-and-golfing obstacle course set up by the friend, as the friend and Barrymore pace him with a golfcart. Huck finishes the course two seconds later than he needed in order to win the bet, but he thinks he has an ace in the hole -- Barrymore is holding the stopwatch, so he assumes she will just declare him the winner if its only a matter of a few seconds. To his horror, as soon as he finishes the course Little Miss Perfect blurts out that he lost by two seconds -- she refuses to cheat, even though mobsters have already hinted strongly that they are going to kill him if he doesn't even things up with them. Lucky You has its moments, but overall its a film with odd casting, an amorphous story, and despite being a film about all-or-nothing poker, an unshakable feeling that there's nothing at stake.