Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

This review contains a minor spoilers.

It honestly isn't often that I watch a movie so mediocre I can't decide whether or not to recommend it. In most cases, movies seem to be something great, or something horrible; it's rare to find any – for me, at least – that fall somewhere in between. Well, here's one.

Lucky You, starring Eric Bana (Hulk, Black Hawk Down) and Drew Barrymore (50 First Dates, the Wedding Singer) is a movie about a professional poker player in Las Vegas, Huck Cheaver (Bana), who believes that poker requires skill, rather than luck. One night, he meets a girl named Billie (Barrymore) and saves her from some schmuck who's hitting on her, only to become the next schmuck who hits on her. She becomes a love interest, but Huck is such a compulsive gambler he almost loses her on several occasions.

Huck is such a compulsive gambler, in fact, that his every effort to get in to the World Series of Poker seems to be thwarted at almost every turn. Watch as Huck sells off all the furniture in his house, steals (okay, he calls it "borrowing" without asking) money, and plays a whole lot of poker in attempt to win a seat at the World Series of Poker, where he hopes to win the big prize like his father, L.C. Cheaver (Robert Duvall) has won twice in the past.

Huck's only problem is that, while he's great at playing poker – and he plays a lot of it in this movie – he somehow keeps losing it all when the money really matters, especially to his unforgiving father who also happens to be competing (he's looking to win number three and go down in history).

Did I mention there is a lot of poker in this movie? If you're a fan of the game, you may enjoy it – although chances are you'd rather watch a real tournament – and if you're not, it may get sort of repetitive after a while. Granted, poker is kind of the focus of the movie, but it leaves little room for character building with the love interest, or doing much of anything else. Perhaps that's a bit unforgiving; there are plenty of scenes where there isn't any poker, but they're honestly not too exciting either. Lucky You suffers from being a movie about a guy who is a compulsive poker player, with a little bit of time left for the love interest and the dysfunctional father-son relationship which, by the way, is also because of poker.

There isn't much of a soundtrack to the movie, or if there is it was so unmemorable that I didn't realize it, and you certainly wouldn't expect lots of whiz-bang special effects from a movie like this. So what else is there to comment on? All of the actors do a fair job what they're supposed to do, though this is quite frankly a disappointing role for one of my favorite actresses, Drew Barrymore. Eric Bana plays a believable gambling addict, and Robert Duvall does a great job of being an unforgiving father. The acting isn't terrible, but there isn't really much left to the movie beyond that.

If you're a poker fan, Lucky You might interest you. If you're in the mood for a good card-playing movie, I'd recommend checking out Maverick (read review) (starring Mel Gibson) instead; it's funny, exciting, devious, and it has poker. Lucky You just has poker.


Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older

Write a Review