Cert PG, 124mins

There’s a reason why the poker games in Casino Royale last year were punctuated by assassination attempts, high-octane seductions and treachery and culminated with Daniel Craig having to hot-wire his own heart by hooking it up to the battery of his Aston Martin. The reason is that poker in cinema is almost invariably crushingly dull. A group of deliberately inexpressive people in bad shirts, sitting around a table for hours — it’s just not an activity that cries out to be shaped into a movie climax. Lucky You, a rare misstep for the director Curtis Hanson, demonstrates this problem rather effectively.

The Australian actor Eric Bana takes the central role of a professional gambler, Huck Cheever. Bana has rarely looked more dashingly handsome than he does in this role. Unfortunately, he’s an actor who gets exponentially more interesting the uglier he looks — his greatest performance remains as Mark “Chopper” Read, a role the required him to look like a tattooed scrotum for much of the film. In Lucky You he’s at best rather bland. His is a reactive performance rather than one that drives the picture forwards. That duty goes to Drew Barrymore as the aspiring singer Billie and to a lupine Robert Duvall as L. C. Cheever, Huck’s battle-scarred old rogue of a father.

Barrymore’s Billie is an anomaly in Vegas, a city where people play their cards close to their chests and their emotions closer. She’s as open as a sunflower, and Huck is immediately charmed. Their tempestuous relationship is on a losing streak from the beginning, however, as Huck’s first and only love is the poker table.

Barrymore seems just to fade out of the film as it ploughs stoically towards its climax. Perhaps her absence is meant to indicate just how much gamblers are forced to give up to cling to this uncertain life, but for the audience it feels as if some much-needed colour has drained from the film.

Duvall, meanwhile, is terrific as the old man who has been fleecing his son at poker since the child was old enough to hold a pack of cards. L. C. deserted Huck and his mother for a life in the casino’s eternal twilight, and Huck has never forgiven him. Of course, they’re more alike than either cares to admit. Father-son tensions come to a head when both qualify for the finals of the World Series poker championships.

Hanson, who co-wrote the script with Eric Roth (The Insider, Munich), opts for authenticity above drama when capturing the world of professional poker players. He even casts real-life poker players to fill the table. And while he does capture the savage swings from high to low; the glory and the humiliation; the exhilaration and the despair, he fails to capture the addictive quality that causes men to give up virtually everything else for the game. If he can’t make us care about the game, he’s not going to get us to care about the players.

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