Okay, first things first: No one is allowed to use poker metaphors ever again. They’ve been done to death, and the clever ones have all been used up. In Lucky You, Huck (Eric Bana) speaks almost exclusively in poker metaphors, forcing other characters to inevitably throw them back in the most predictable ways. For example, when speaking to his love interest, Billie (Drew Barrymore), Huck might describe something as “a good fold.” So when Billie breaks up with him, guess what she’ll say to describe the break-up? That’s not clever. That’s the screenwriting equivalent of “stacking the deck.” I just used a poker metaphor. See how they suck?
Huck is a professional poker player. Why? I can’t imagine, because he’s a really bad poker player who consistently makes horrible bets based on emotion and impulse, leading him to repeatedly lose, not only his money, but also objects that supposedly carry sentimental value. Usually, he loses all of this to his poker-playing father (Robert Duvall), whom we realize is Huck’s father much sooner than the film thinks we do.
Any human being playing with a full deck—see how insidious poker metaphors are?—would quickly come to the conclusion that this behavior is severely counterproductive. But not Huck. That’s why Billie’s in the movie: to point things out to Huck that are already readily apparent. This is problematic since Billie is played by Drew Barrymore doing a bad Drew Barrymore impression. In this film, she takes her usual cutesy schtick to a cartoonish new level.
But the worst part is co-writer/director Curtis Hanson’s sloppy work. He films a love scene on the top of a parking garage overlooking the Bellagio fountain. That’s the Las Vegas equivalent of shooting a love scene in front of Niagara Falls before panning over to a fireplace. Later, during a scene on a suburban street, where Billie breaks up with Huck, Billie turns away at her emotional pique and hails a cab. There isn’t a car in sight, but suddenly, a taxi pulls up. In the suburbs. And this is the same guy who directed L.A. Confidential.
Normally, the combination of Hanson, Bana, Barrymore and co-writer Eric Roth would be a pretty strong hand, and that makes Lucky You a really bad beat. That’s right—this whole movie’s a bad poker metaphor, and bad poker metaphors are hereby banned.
Lucky You *
Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall
Directed by Curtis Hanson
Rated PG-13