Lucky You (2007)

A hotshot poker player tries to win a tournament in Vegas, but is fighting a losing battle with his personal problems.

Director:

Curtis Hanson

Writers:

Eric Roth (screenplay), Curtis Hanson (screenplay),

Stars:

Phyllis Somerville, Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore

1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Phyllis Somerville	...	Pawnbroker
Eric Bana	...	Huck Cheever
Horatio Sanz	...	Ready Eddie
Drew Barrymore	...	Billie Offer
Joey Kern	...	Billie's Admirer
Debra Messing	...	Suzanne Offer
Delaine Yates	...	Ginger
Mykel Shannon Jenkins	...	Gary
Robert Duvall	...	L. C. Cheever
Charles Martin Smith	...	Roy Durucher
Robert Downey Jr.	...	Telephone Jack
Saverio Guerra	...	Lester
Danny Hoch	...	Bobby Basketball
Kenny Cau	...	Chinese Restaurant Waiter
Kelvin Han Yee	...	Chico Banh

Storyline

In Las Vegas, Huck Cheever is a poker player, brilliant but also prone to let emotion take over. It's the week of the poker world series, and Huck must come up with the $10,000 entry fee, which he wins, loses, borrows, and loses - and even steals part of from Billie Offer, an earnest young woman who's new in town and who catches Huck's eye. By the time the tournament starts, Huck owes everyone. Complicating things is the arrival of Huck's father, whom Huck detests for having left his mother, a champion player in town to win. Can Huck learn to play poker the way he lives and to live the way he plays poker? Or is his only flush the sound of his life going down the toilet?

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Plot Keywords:

poker | poker player | losing | pawnshop | volleyball | 

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Taglines:

Take a chance.

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Genres:

Drama | Romance | Sport

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for some language and sexual humor

Details

Official Sites:

Warner Bros [fr] Warner Bros. [us]

Country:

USA Germany Australia

Language:

English Spanish

Release Date:

4 May 2007 (USA)

Also Known As:

Bem-vindo ao Jogo

Filming Locations:

Lake Las Vegas, Henderson, Nevada, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$55,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

£56,346 (UK) (22 June 2007)

Gross:

$5,755,286 (USA) (29 June 2007)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Warner Bros, Village Roadshow Pictures, Deuce Three Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

124 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Was initially scheduled for a release date of September 8, 2006. It was then pushed back to March 16, 2007. It was pushed back once more, before finally being released on May 4, 2007. Several posters were already made up for the film that still had it's original release date of September 8, 2006 on it.

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Goofs

At the beginning of the final scene in Dino's parking lot, the wide shot shows a car backing onto the street. In the next frame (narrow shot), the car has disappeared.

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Quotes

Huck Cheever: The chair thing is an old gag and I did it for you because I thought you'd find it funny.

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Crazy Credits

After the credits there is a scene where Ready Eddie and Lester (the man with breast implants) argue over whether Lester actually spent an entire month in the bathroom or not. As the current month has thirty-one days and not just thirty. They soon begin to discuss whether the month of August has either thirty or thirty-one days, which soon leads them to a double-or-nothing wager over the fact.

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Connections

Referenced in I Am Legend (2007)

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Soundtracks

"All Shook Up"
Written by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley
Performed by Jackie Edwards
Courtesy of Trojan Records
By Arrangement with Sanctuary Records Group

User Reviews

Why poker and movies just don't mix

Only the most die-hard poker fans will find much to cheer about in "Lucky You," a Freudian drama set in the high-stakes world of the Vegas strip.

Eric Bana ("Munich") and Robert Duvall star as Huck and L.C. Cheever, two world-class poker players with many unresolved father/son issues between them. Huck resents the fact that he's had to live virtually all his adult life in the shadow of his famous father who, with his constant carousing, stealing and gambling, made life a living hell for Huck's mother virtually till the day she died. What Huck doesn't realize - and this is where Doctor Freud comes in - is that he is pretty much following in his father's footsteps both in his choice of profession and his relations with women. Meanwhile, L.C. hangs out around the casinos and coffee shops of the city trying to reconcile with his boy, while at the same time, doling out unasked-for advice about how the young man should be living his life both at and away from the poker table. Drew Barrymore completes the cast as Billie Offer, a young, morally upright ingénue from Bakersfield who has come to Sin City to begin her career as a singer and who winds up falling under the spell of the ethically-challenged Huck. Or could it be that the beatific Billie is really an angel of the Lord come to lead the iniquitous Huck out of this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah?

The scenes between Bana and Barrymore are probably the best in the film and one wishes that more time would have been spent developing that relationship instead of sitting around the poker table. For whenever the story moves into the casino, the movie stops dead in its tracks, proving once again that poker, by its very nature, makes for one of the least compelling sports ever to be depicted on film. Anyone without a thorough working knowledge of the ins and outs of Texas Hold'em, in particular, is going to find himself lost in all the arcane trivia of the poker-playing scenes (which take up quite a large chunk of the movie's overall running time, I might add). Even worse is the fact that the father/son angle is so clichéd and hackneyed at this point that even actors of the caliber of Bana and Duvall (and they are both excellent) can't be expected to really pull it off.

There are some quality elements in "Lucky You." Director Curtis Hanson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth, proves yet again - as he did in "LA Confidential" and "8 Mile" - that he knows how to extract the essence of a locale to build atmosphere and mood. Moreover, the interactions between Huck and Billie are often flavorful and intriguing (which is more than can be said for those between Huck and his dad). The performances are uniformly impressive, with Barrymore, in particular, showing a bit more range here than she has in most of her previous roles.

Hanson has populated his film with a number of real life poker playing celebrities, which may be of interest to the aficionados but won't mean much to the rest of us. Sad to say, but the lackluster "Lucky You" is unlikely to appeal to anyone not already passionate about professional poker - and unlikely to garner the sport itself many new fans.