Dir. Curtis Hanson , US, 2007, 124 mins
Cast: Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall
Review by Carol Allen
The Las Vegas of this movie is a long way from the sleazy city of Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas. Hanson's film presents the gambling capital as a shiny, pretty place with sparkling lights, where even the poker room is non smoking. And poker is at the centre of the story. Huck (Bana) is a professional poker player, an expert at reading the body language of his opponents, but like most gamblers he never has the sense to quit when he's ahead. Having learned the game at his daddy's knee, his greatest rival and continuing mentor is his dad L.C. Cheever (Duvall) with whom he has, as psycho babble would put it, a lot of issues. An expert at avoiding emotional commitment, Huck finds his cage being rattled by Billie (Barrymore) a wannabe singer and new girl in town. So the story has two questions to resolve. Will Billie and Huck make a go of it, and will Huck and his dad resolve their personal conflicts through the poker tournament with its $2.5m prize, which is the big event providing the climax of the film?
One of the problems with the film is that poker, even more than sex, is great fun if you're playing but not much of a spectator sport. So in order for you to care about the game, you have to care about the characters, who are playing it. Bana brings a lot of charm and a sweet smile to his role and Barrymore is as usual engaging in a naïve puppy sort of way, but once they've exchanged childhood histories and they've fallen out over the fact that he's "borrowed" her money to play the tables, their relationship doesn't really have much of interest to offer except to wonder if and how they are going to get back together again.
Duvall turns in his usual solid and watchable performance but no surprises here either and he is given some philosophically moralising dialogue using the poker idiom, which smacks more of fortune cookie wisdom. Eric Roth's script irritatingly introduces several minor characters, who are potentially more interesting than the principals but never developed. For example Robert Downie Jnr as Huck's friend Telephone Jack, who operates a scam giving psychiatric advice over the phone, hence the name. He has one scene and then disappears from the film. Debra Messing as Billie's older sister has next to nothing to do and there's a gem of a performance from Phyllis Somerville as a pawnbroker in a scene with Huck at the very beginning, which is one of the best things in the movie, but that's all you get of her too. This is a pleasant enough movie and if you're a card player you may get some fun out of the interminable games of poker, of which there are a lot. But compared to Hanson's previous films, such as L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile it's distinctly bland, predictable and unmemorable.
|
