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Shelf Beauties |
Lucky You If you know nothing about Texas
Hold ‘Em poker and don’t care to, make sure the
other people in the audience
don’t hear you snoring through the movie's 5 million poker playing scenes. By the fifth All In, I wanted All Out.
Set in the classic,
carefree, olde tyme days of 2003, Eric Bana stars as Huck – a
talented
professional poker player in debt, desperately trying to qualify for
the World
Series of Poker (with a $2.5 Million prize) and dealing with his
legendary Dad,
LC (Robert Duvall), and their strained relationship.
Of course, he also meets a woman, Billie (Drew
Barrymore), who challenges him to improve himself and his ways. Can Huck get it together
before it is too late?  Maybe someone in the Warner
Brothers’ marketing department thought it was a great idea to
take a man’s
sport like poker and cross pollinate it with a movie about feelings,
love and
familial relations, so men and women would want to see Lucky You
together. Maybe
that someone is getting fired this
week. Lucky You is horribly
boring, banal, and breathtakingly lifeless.
Director/co-writer Curtis Hanson and co-writer Eric
Roth seem to want us
to like the characters because they are cute looking, or because we
inherently
know who the heroes are supposed to be, but that’s not enough. We get some passing scenes
trying to explain the
dysfunctional relationship between LC and Huck, and a little bit about
some sort
of family falling out years before, but nothing that is memorable or
compelling. Then, the love story between
Billie and Huck seems to be based on nothing but Billie’s
possibly lustful eye
for a bad boy, and a desire to rebel against the sister who warns her
to stay
away from Huck. If
everyone was 20 years
younger, and one of them was Patrick Swayze or James Dean, maybe that
movie
would be passable for those under 18 years old as a traditional teen rebellion movie, but Lucky You is trying
to
appeal to older people, like me, who will need more.
Sadly, Bana, Duvall and
Barrymore can’t save the movie from making you wish you
bought your tickets for
Spider-Man 3 online before it sold out.
Bana and Barrymore have no chemistry together, as
all of the actors
perform as if told to act like they don’t have a pulse 90% of
the time. A poker
face is handy in Vegas, but not in Supposedly tense showdowns fall
flat. The
relationship stuff never grabs
your heart and shakes up your emotions, and no character makes enough
noise to
wake up the crowd. Lucky You is rated PG-13 for some language and sexual humor.
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