Lucky You
When good directors go bad: Curtis Hanson provides a case study with his leaden poker drama “Lucky You.” The cheeseball romantic dialogue, co-written by the out-of-their-depth duo of Hanson and Eric Roth, certainly doesn’t help, nor does their awkward attempt to capture the transformation of Texas Hold ‘Em from an esoteric, backroom card game into a personality-driven pseudo-sport televised by major networks. But I think “Lucky You” was doomed by a less obviously misguided choice: the casting of Eric Bana in the lead. Bana isn’t a bad actor; instead, he has a suffocating competence. An Australian native of Croatian ancestry, Bana is a gifted mimic who can inhabit characters from a wide array of cultural backgrounds. His dark eyes and well-proportioned face reward the camera’s close scrutiny. But if you’re looking for an actor who can foster that peculiar, ineffable connection between a viewer and a projected image, Bana’s not your man. It’s not that he’s superficial, exactly, but the physical mechanics of film acting come so easily to him that you feel like he’s putting you on. You don’t trust him. He doesn’t dig into the souls of the men he plays; he’s diffident, passionless. No wonder his scenes with Drew Barrymore have a deep-space chill. Barrymore is dreadful. Determined to be taken seriously, she tosses aside her cutesy mannerisms and projects a brain-dead blankness. But “Lucky You” rests on Bana’s sculpted shoulders, and he might as well be shrugging them with indifference.
LISTEN: Lucky You