DVD Reviews

Lucky You

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Poker player Huck Cheever (Bana) needs to get his hands on ten grand quick-smart so he can enter into the World Poker Championships in Las Vegas. When his estranged father L.C (Duvall) also enters into the running, he is forced to take money from a local shylock (Smith) for a chance to beat him. Can the naive Billie (Barrymore) bring the warring men together? Lucky You opens with a good scene: Huck enters a pawn shop to hock a digital camera. The woman says she already has three cameras, but Huck, never one to take anything lying down, persuades her to take it with his gift of the gab. This opening gambit allows us to forgive or give the benefit of the doubt to any crap that follows because Huck is such a slick character. Unfortunately, that's as good as Lucky You gets and it never reaches that peak again. Like two movies pushed together, Lucky You is one part cool poker movie, while the other is a Drew Barrymore rom-com and never the twain should meet. It's easy to blame Drew Barrymore for all its faults as the movie plunges into the mire of crap every time she's on screen, but it's not her acting that's at fault here - it's her character. Playing the unbelievably green Billie, Barrymore is dealt lines that wouldn't have made the final draft of a Doris Day movie - a bad Doris Day movie, at that. Her Billie is so wet behind the ears, she confuses 'hustle' with 'rustle' and 'sick pony' with 'sick puppy'. From the writer who gave us all a lesson in the art of subtle dialogue in The Good Shepherd and The Insider, Eric Roth gives us so many 'this movie is about ...' and 'I am this way because ...' lines - i.e. thematic dialogue that fears that the audience are complete and utter idiots. Unfortunately for Roth, but fortunately for us, we're not.
Director: Curtis Hanson.
Starring: Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Charles Martin Smith.
Details: 124mins / 12A

Review by Gavin Burke