Lucky You

Directed by Curtis Hanson

It’s only fair that after the enormous, but undeserved, acclaim for L.A. Confidential, writer/director Curtis Hanson’s truly poor talent should be exposed in one lousy film after another. Hanson’s gambling movie, Lucky You, follows the debacles Wonder Boys and In Her Shoes. It doesn’t capitalize on the recent poker craze—the game’s sedentary just like Hanson’s static, contrived style. He sticks Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore like unlit candles atop a stale birthday cake, playing out the cliché of lost adults gambling for love in Las Vegas.

Instead of enlivening moments of risk, or capturing a sense of place (the hallmark of gambling films from Bay of Angels to California Split), Hanson goes for dull profundity—Bana’s Oedipal issues with his poker king dad (Robert Duvall, never smoother, doing complex motivations simply). Typical of Hanson’s glum, offensive method, audiences are forced to watch stereotyped characters go through hackneyed routines. Lucky You lacks the fascination of L.A. Confidential’s ’50s Hollywood decadence and has no interest in the contemporary issues of Paul Verhoeven’s misunderstood Vegas film, Showgirls.

Young love was never so puerile as here, with Bana overdoing boyishness and Barrymore confusing drabness with maturity. Hanson flubs the danger/desire mix of James Toback’s gambling/love comedy, The Pick-Up Artist, where a relationship exposes a couple’s individual obsessions. Slathering on Springsteen and Dylan songs don’t help. Neither does a pre-op tranny best friend (Danny Hoch). Hanson stages the big World Series of Poker climax like an “American Idol” elimination—with select character-actors smugly taking a bow before making their long-overdue exits. Problem is, instead of revitalizing this well-practiced material, Hanson slows it down. Lucky You sat on Warner’s shelf for a year; now that it’s finally on the screen, it’s still sedentary.