Text size:

'Lucky You'

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

May 4, 2007

"Lucky You" opens with a killer sequence that, by itself, is one of the best short films you'll ever see. Professional poker-player Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) is anxious to scare up enough cash to buy his way into a big game. So he tries to hustle an incredulous pawnbroker (Phyllis Somerville of "Little Children") into giving him more money for a digital camera. She's impressed with his moxie, but she's not going to budge - even when he throws in his mother's wedding ring.

Even though all this happens before the title credits roll, you find yourself wondering whether anything that follows will live up to it. Very little does - which makes "Lucky You," like its protagonist, an impressive-looking but aimless bluffer, tossing down more angles than it's able to carry through. It doesn't go downhill as much as it staggers and wanders along a craggy slope.

As the movie's characters keep proclaiming, Huck is better at playing his game than at living his life. He charges from table to table in Vegas, losing his winnings as fast as he makes them. This leaves him without furniture in his house, but some considerable psychic baggage, mainly long-standing resentment against his father (the peerless Robert Duvall), a legendary poker champion who's trying to make amends - and teach his son how to play smart.

Director Curtis Hanson usually has better luck with reckless, overgrown adolescents such as Huck who can't quite balance themselves. (See "Wonder Boys" or "In Her Shoes.") But this thickly layered, character-driven storyline needed to be either tightened or loosened to make it less static.

Once in a while, as in a sequence in which Huck races along a golf course to win a screwball bet, the movie retrieves the tension it initially promises. But mostly it flows like this: See Huck win, see Huck lose, see Huck hustle, see Huck and Dad bicker, see Huck lose, see Huck show his naive girlfriend (Drew Barrymore, who seems lost here) how to play cards; see Huck win, lose, hustle and so on.

What makes such narrative inertness more annoying is the sight of good actors (Robert Downey Jr., Debra Messing) in promising roles just whizzing by with no time to get acquainted or, in Downey's case, even knowing why he's there in the first place. Bana, fortunately, manages to carry this ungainly apparatus without losing too much of his leading-man credibility, lucky (so to speak) for him.