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Lucky You Delivers A Bad Beat To Poker
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Author: Marc Weinberg
May 08 - They say there is no such thing as bad publicity but what the latest Hollywood film Lucky You does to the public's conception of poker has to come close to upending that assertion. There is such a thing as a bad film, however, and lucky you are indeed if you get to read this review before you pay good money to see this abomination.
The plot revolves around the Oedipal struggles of one Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) who lives in the shadow of his legendary father LC Cheever (Robert Duvall), who has won the World Series Of Poker twice. Huck goes on tilt every time he sees his dad in the same room. This is probably because Duvall insists on calling him "Huckleberry", chanelling the voice of Foghorn Leghorn as he does so.
The Huckleberry atrocity still reverberates in my skull as I type these words. Imagine a Southern twang with a hint of a Cajun New Orleans accent on the 'behreh' - and bear in mind that he refers to him as Huckleberry throughout the movie, leaving me ready to leap up and drive a steel spike through the movie screen in order to make it stop.
Anyway, I digress. Huck is a "blaster", the kind of poker player who goes up big and then has a major meltdown at the table and gives it all back. At the beginning of the movie he is pawning off a digital camera, which we later found out he stole from the guy renting a room in his empty house (empty because he's already pawned off all the furniture).
On the way into the pawn shop he bumps into Mike Matusow who is just leaving. Just kidding, but he's that type of player. The rest of Huck's character is a mystery both to us, to Bana, and most unfortunate of all to the writers of the film. It's clear that he wants to beat his father at poker but playing poker with anyone else seems to be a matter of some indifference to him.
Since poker is his whole life, and he's presumably doing very badly at it since he can't even afford to fill up his swimming pool with water, one wonders what goes through his mind during moments of self-reflection? He spends the entire movie trying to scrape together the $10k buy-in for the WSOP Main Event, but every time he has $10,000 (and there are many many times in this movie when he gets the money) he either manages to lose it gambling or it is suddenly whisked away from him thanks to some awful bad beat.
Huck has to run 5 miles and play 18 holes of golf all in 3 hours, and shoot 78 or better in order to win a $10,000 bet. He finishes in 3 hours and 2 seconds and loses, even as he sinks a monster putt for the round of 78. Oh, and it's in 100 degree heat. I'm not making this stuff up. How bad is Lucky You really? That sequence is the most credible scene in the entire film, and also the most enjoyable.
Yes, the rest of the writing is far worse than this. In the climax of the movie Huck faces his father at the final table of the Main Event and holds AA (of course) against the old man's KK. The board reads 2-5-7-2-8 with no flush option. Dad moves all-in with his Kings. Huck calls. But when LC turns over the Cowboys, referred to as such, Huck mucks his winning Aces because he realizes that letting his father try to win the tournament means more to him than winning it for himself.
How does Huck manage to muck the winning hand when it's the 2003 WSOP and they have introduced lipstick cameras at the final table to show players' hole cards? The commentators mention before the action gets underway that he is the only player who has refused to show his cards to the cameras. Why? There is no explanation for this, either through any of the character's previous actions or in his own words. The only explanation of course is that it is expedient for the scriptwriters, even though it is absolute nonsense and patently ridiculous.
I haven't even touched on the romantic comedy element of this film, which takes up a lot of time. Drew Barrymore plays a lounge singer with an IQ substantially cooler than the Las Vegas climate, who has just moved to Sin City and knows nothing about life in general and poker in particular. She is the wide-eyed innocent who could find true love with the main character from I Am Sam, but seems like a fish out of water in this spot.
Their budding romance gives the writers the opportunity for Huck to explain to her how Hold'em is played thanks to some expository dialogue culled straight from Bravo's celebrity poker show. He does this while involved in a live hand for real money, you know the way poker players always behave when they bring their girl to the table, have her sit down in the seat next to them (just to watch), and then tell her what they have and how they're going to play it.
Eric Bana bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Corey Feldman in this role, and the producers really missed out on a golden opportunity by not giving this movie to Corey, since he could have handled bringing the blank character to life just as well and would have done it for peanuts.
The most satisying moment in the story is when Huck bangs Barrymore's character and robs her. It is a testament to the processed, sugary-sweet nature of this movie that we do not see the banging or the robbing. Instead we see the aftermath of one as they cuddle in bed, and the preliminaries to the other as Huckleberry eyes her handbag replete with her life savings. If only the writers had switched that around the audience might have had a moment of entertainment.
The film has so much pretentious dialogue, and the actors deliver the lines as though penned by Shakespeare: Barrymore leaves Bana and when he begs her to come back she says "I'm making a good fold". Bana tries to needle Duvall as they sit at the Big Game in the Bellagio by saying "If you play by the book you might as well start playing online". This line shows how little the writers actually know about poker. It is incoherent on more than one level; a tribute to ignorance.
Then there is the interminable coverage of poker hands in the movie. There is one that is handled well, and where a point is made, but other than that it's the usual exagerrated nonsense as in the case of this magical hand straight out of everyday experience:
Five clubs on the board, one player has the King-high flush, and the other has made a straight flush on the river. You can just see the writers congratulating themselves for not giving the losing opponent the Ace-high flush and thereby keepin' it real ("Should we give her the Ace and him the straight flush? Nah, too unrealistic. We'll give her the King. Yeah. Awesome!")
If you don't like poker the movie will leave you cold and bored. If you do like poker the movie will infuriate you and leave you angry for wasting money on it when you could have been blasting away online and losing money there.
As someone who plays poker and writes for a living it is impossible for me to believe that the people responsible for this film are capable of doing either.
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