Dorks And Losers

In many ways, Lucky You is an ode to those peo­ple who make their liv­ing play­ing poker. Given how the pop­u­lar­ity of pro­fes­sional poker has exploded the last few years around the annual World Series of Poker, you prob­a­bly expected more movies about the famous gam­bling game. Sur­pris­ingly there haven’t been that many.

And if you were going to make a main­stream Hol­ly­wood movie about poker, you’d cen­ter it around the 2003 World Series and make it as tension-filled as the tele­vised ver­sion shown on ESPN. When you first heard Cur­tis Han­son (L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, 8 Mile) would direct a movie about poker, that’s prob­a­bly what you thought Lucky You was going to be.

But Han­son has a deeper affec­tion for those week-in, week-out pro­fes­sion­als, and his recent movie is a nod to them. Eric Bana (Troy, Munich) plays Huck Cheever, a pro­fes­sional poker player and son of leg­endary two-time World Series cham­pion L.C. Cheever (Robert Duvall). Huck has two styles of poker play: one where he plays the smart odds and wins, and the other where he plays the emo­tional odds and loses. The for­mer gets him respect from the other play­ers, while the lat­ter loses him respect from his father.

A few days before the World Series, Huck still doesn’t have a seat at the main event and tries in vain to come up with the money. Dur­ing his efforts, he meets Bil­lie Offer (Drew Bar­ry­more). On the out­side, Bil­lie just seems to be a ran­dom girl — even­tu­ally she is found to be the lit­tle sis­ter of a for­mer girl­friend (Debra Mess­ing) — that Huck is inter­ested in. But Bil­lie is much more to Huck than that. She’s dif­fer­ent than the other women in Las Vegas, and doesn’t imme­di­ately fall for Huck’s smooth­ness. And in Sin City, Bil­lie has no sin.

Huck’s father says it best about him: “You play cards the way you should lead your life. And you lead your life the way you should play cards.” Huck lives his life in a series of highs and lows, and more often than not Huck is at a low, barely scrap­ing by and pawn­ing his pos­ses­sions to keep going. He doesn’t real­ize that life and poker can be played the same way. He needs to finally under­stand when to walk away and what to hold on to.

Much of the movie is a who’s who of the poker world, fea­tur­ing the game’s top stars like Johnny Chan, Jim Lester, and Doyle Brun­son. The World Series takes a back­seat in this movie, in favor of the com­mon side bets between play­ers and the less glam­orous, more skill­ful cash game matches. There are numer­ous ref­er­ences to the lowly Inter­net play­ers who win more often than not on luck rather than skill.

It’s inter­est­ing how much the “reg­u­lars” despise the com­puter play­ers. Online play puts empha­sis on know­ing the odds, but table play takes more skill in the long run — hav­ing a good poker face, read­ing peo­ple, know­ing when to go with your gut, etc.

Lucky You is enter­tain­ing, but the love story between Bana and Bar­ry­more is under­de­vel­oped while the father-son rivalry seems to drag on. I will say, how­ever, that the movie does devi­ate from a very com­mon cliché near the finale that helps the movie come full circle.

Spe­cial Features

There are three sets of extras, two fea­turettes and one com­pi­la­tion of deleted scenes.

The first fea­turette is called “The Play­ers at the Table,” which is about the level of involve­ment that those every­day poker play­ers had in Lucky You’s devel­op­ment. There are many inter­views with Lester, Brun­son (a con­sul­tant to Han­son), Jen­nifer Har­man, and other play­ers who guide you through play­ing professionally.

The other fea­turette is called “The Reel Deal” which details cen­ter­ing the movie around the spe­cific 2003 World Series tour­na­ment. The poker hands are also empha­sized, tai­lor­ing the cards to spe­cific expe­ri­enced hands dur­ing the 2003 event and to spe­cific cards that emit cer­tain emo­tions in var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. The film’s poker authen­tic­ity was very impor­tant to Han­son and to those real play­ers involved in shap­ing the movie.

The last extra is a series of deleted scenes that are unnec­es­sary. There are a few more poker scenes that I think were excluded because they were too slow. Hav­ing too many poker scenes turns the movie into a poker movie instead of a movie about poker.

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