Lucky You

Warner Bros. sat on this Vegas-based snoozefest for a year and a half before finally dumping it into theaters as counter-programming against the juggernaut that is Spider-Man 3. That strategy might make sense if Lucky You were the Eric Bana/Drew Barrymore romance the studio is selling. (The Devil Wears Prada, which appealed to a huge female audience, did blockbuster business opposite Superman Returns last year.) But this is a guy movie, a straightforward, low-key drama about the relationship between estranged father-and-son poker players. Huck Cheever (Bana) is brash and reckless; daddy L.C. (Robert Duvall) is the kind of ornery cuss who makes a great poker player but a lousy father. Billie (Barrymore) is the girlfriend who offers Huck the kind of stability he’s incapable of embracing. And that’s about all there is to it, despite the promise of a father-son showdown at the World Series of Poker. Huck wins big and loses bigger; Billie dumps him until he wins her over (and over) again. It may be impossible for Duvall to give a completely bad performance, but Bana and Barrymore lose their struggle with dialog dominated by increasingly cheesy poker platitudes, and the film lacks real insight into the game.