Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Must be tough playing in the shadow of your father", October 6, 2007
This is a great time to come out with a movie about poker, since the sport has taken off at supersonic speed with amateurs winning the main event of the World Series in the last few years and people following the action on ESPN. The main problem I see with this movie though is that in an effort to be original it runs into unreal situations like a misdeal followed by a huge bad beat, or a close call to end a contrived bet.
The plot is fairly typical, a poker pro, Huck Cleever, trying to make it to the World Series of poker and win the main event. In the process, he meets a girl that shakes his world and makes him rethink his priorities. The added complication is that he is the son of a two-time winner of the event, and the son-father relationship has been in tatters for a long time. During his quest, Huck experiences huge swings in his luck, and this provides an enlightening view of what the life of a professional gambler can be like.
The acting is not particularly inspired, with the exception of Robert Duvall, who plays L.C. Cheever, the father of the protagonist. Duvall infuses his character with the external toughness and inner conflicts that the role requires and is therefore extremely successful in the process. There is a wide array of poker pros taking part in this movie, but most of them have silent roles, the exceptions are Sammy Farha and Jason Lester, who have a couple of lines each. The list of celebrities includes among others Phil Helmut, Daniel Negreanu, Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson. I did not really understand why a couple of pros play characters with different names, like Jennifer Harman, who plays Shannon Kincaid, or John Hennigan as Ralph Kaczynski.
Overall, I think that the idea of the movie was good, but the execution was deficient and the overall quality suffered as a result. For a long time to come, poker movies are going to be evaluated in terms of how they compare to Rounders, and in that sense, this one comes up short. Poker players will probably get some enjoyment from this production, but they should not expect much.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This movie was so boring!!!, May 27, 2008
This movie is about a poker player that has had a strained relationship with his father who meets a girl. And that's about it. There is no depth or chemistry between the couple, you certainly don't root for them to be together. The father and son do repair their strained relationship at the end of the movie.
There are several poker matches shown so if you like poker, you might like this movie otherwise you probably won't.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Short on romance, long on the intricacies of poker, May 28, 2007
"Lucky You" is a tutorial in professional poker. The strategy. The company. And, most importantly for any movie that chooses to invest in its subject - the nature of it. The screenplay - written by Eric Roth and director Curtis Hanson - charts the heartbeat of an addicted gambler, a pulse that mirrors that of a cocaine user: Joyous leaps and races punctuated by moments when the flow of blood almost stops completely.
It strips some of the manly sweat away from the craft, too. The movie lacks the histrionics and black drama of, say, "Rounders," in part because "Rounders" is a myth, born of the idea men have about the wars of personality going on at a poker table. "Lucky You" has its clashes, for sure, and its cliches, too, but they lack blarney and false bravado. Here, poker is risk management. Actuarial work. And it makes sense.
Eric Bana turns in a committed performance as Huck Cheever, a Las Vegas poker player - he dabbles in other ridiculous bets of chance, cards, and athletic skill, but is careful never to play "the house" - whose attitude might best be likened to golfer Phil Mickelson. Huck fires for the pin on nearly every hand, overshoots the cards, and never seems to get the river when he needs it most. It's not that Huck doesn't see the angles - he chooses to obliterate them. Again and again. That's how he ends up with an empty house whose deed is held by a sports gambler watching seven televisions at once, including Australian basketball.
The movie opens with Huck pawning his mother's ring, in an effort to get a $10,000 stake in the World Series of Poker. He'll win it that $10,000, then he'll lose it, win it, lose it. His shifting fortune will involve a lounge singer new to Vegas named Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore). As her own character, Billie, seemingly naïve but oddly full of rectitude, is ill-defined. As a mirror held up to Huck's unshaven face, she would be effective if Barrymore, a sunny, buoyant actor unsuited to the moral compromises of Sin City, weren't playing her. "Lucky You" tries on romance but never makes it fit very well.
Better are the father/son dynamics between Huck and his father L.C. (Robert Duvall), a revered champion for whom Huck has unmitigated disdain. There are no surprises in their absent chemistry - L.C. was a deadbeat dad, Huck developed into a deadbeat, in general - but their scenes, especially one in a diner over several games of Guts, are fiercely written. Duvall still knows how to massage a monologue with his halting speech patterns; he uses a comic's understanding of a punchline to create a lizard of a man, down his slicked mat of hair plugs. L.C. sees himself as a Picasso of cards, an artist who sense his "time" of heightened skills is drawing to a close.
Thing is, Huck still has the nose.
For what? The mood of a hand. The unspoken momentum of it. The smell of winning and money. "Lucky You" has no prideful illusions about poker - if anything, it sticks its talons hard into the idea of "manning up" - but it still injects an air of tension and romance into its many poker hands. However misguided or addictive the behavior might be, most of the players in the movie show a love (or at least a healthy lust) for the craft; only Huck seems bent on something greater than victory. Michael Shannon and Jean Smart are especially effective in smaller as two of Huck's competitors, but the credit can be spread around; using several actors from "8 Mile," director Hanson asks for hunger and mild desperation, and he gets it from them.
Hanson's camera is equally nuanced. This is no Vegas glamour pic; we are spared helicopter dollies of The Strip. The candy lights blink in the background of many scenes, but the characters are not enamored or gob smacked by the scene, including Billie. This is a movie of people who live here, and work here, and it is long past excitement. Such honesty about the city - and the willpower to resist it becoming a character of its own - is refreshing.
Aside from Billie, the movie's weakness is a nearly endless final act that covers the World Series of Poker, not since Stallone's "Over The Top" - I'm semi-serious here - has a movie been so committed to introducing new characters in the final thirty minutes like video game bosses, then placing a miniature story arc on their fortunes. The movie's two twists are easily spotted before they unfold and the "resolution," as it were, seems a little dishonest, if morally tidy.
Nevertheless, "Lucky You" has a surprising amount of integrity, and Bana delivers a smooth, like-him-loathe-him performance, equal parts intelligence and ego. He only missteps when he has to make eyes at Barrymore. Funny that Roth and Hanson have a romantic angle for commercial appeal, only to have the movie shelved and dumped on the same weekend of the largest opening in film history ("Spider-Man 3").
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