Long poker scenes drag down ineffective movie

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 3, 2007

‘Lucky You” is a misfire from the usually reliable director Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”), who seems to have fallen under the spell of televised poker tournaments.

There’s a whole lot of poker in “Lucky You,” and if you’ve ever gotten hooked watching a poker game on TV, you know the game can be weirdly suspenseful. But as a movie spectacle, it’s not exactly football. Do you want to pay $9 to see it on a movie screen?

The principal players here are Huck Cheever (Eric Bana), a lifetime poker player whose existence caroms between drowning in a pile of $100 chips and pawning his mother’s wedding ring for a stake.

He was trained by his cool-hearted, two-time poker champion father, L.C. (Robert Duvall), recently returned from a card-playing tour of the south of France. A poker World Series looms, and given the bad blood and rivalry between the two, can a showdown be far off?

For a while, the movie is something of a companion piece to Hanson’s “Wonder Boys”: It’s a study of a guy who can’t stop making the same mistakes over and over, despite the evidence of his losing ways.

There are some funny sequences tracking this, including Huck’s foolish round of guts poker against his father in a diner, and a lunatic bet that he can run five miles and play a round of golf in three hours.

Meantime, there’s romance with a bar singer from Bakersfield, Calif., Billie (Drew Barrymore). She puts up with Huck’s irresponsible ways far too long, and Barrymore is stuck with some overly dewy lines of dialogue – still, she gives a touching performance.

By finding a few old-school Vegas haunts, Hanson tries to make the place interesting. But the movie obsessively returns to the gaming tables, where sequence after sequence is devoted to the gripping issue of what card will be turned over next. (You’d better have a rudimentary grasp of Texas Hold ‘Em before you go to this film, or you’re going to have a lot of daydreaming time.)

Bana, late of “The Hulk” and “Munich,” is a strong dramatic actor, but he’s not blessed with an abundance of charm. This movie needs a little of that.

Other people fill in bits: Robert Downey Jr. in a one-scene part as a telephone scammer, Phyllis Sommerville in a marvelous opening scene in a pawnshop, Charles Martin Smith as a money man.

Hanson’s style is elegant, and I liked the movie’s unhurried gait. But let me repeat: If you don’t already know a straight flush from three of a kind, this movie is not for you.

Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana star in “Lucky You.”