Lucky You

DIRECTOR: Curtis Hanson

Whatever happened to Curtis Hanson of LA Confidential and 8 Mile?

Forget the comparisons between life and gambling, or its take on a father-son relationship. Behind the poker-faced pretentiousness, Lucky You is a self-indulgent film trying to be delusioningly meaningful — starting with the pretense that its lead actor is anything other than a pathetic gambler who will beg, borrow or steal to play another game of poker, and at night, calmly lie down on a beach chair next to his empty pool slugging bear.

In any other movie he would end up on a shrink’s couch. Here he gets respectability with a seat on the world championship table at Las Vegas.

Obviously Hanson’s gamble paid off as far as actors go, with Barrymore (whose idea of dressing up for Vegas is wearing mascara for breakfast), Bana and Duvall signing on. Even Robert Downey Jr does a cameo, and pulls it off.

However, the audiences, after sitting through endless rounds of poker, aren’t likely to be as easily bluffed. Hanson, it seems, forgot the first rule of the game as per his own film: knowing when to fold your cards.