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Curtis 'LA Confidential' Hanson takes a gamble with Lucky You, but his hand isn't strong enough to sustain this poker-based drama, with rather more poker than drama. Eric Bana is Huck Cheever, a professional Las Vegas player struggling to escape the shadow of famous father LC (Robert Duvall). Can lounge singer Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore) engineer a reconciliation? And will we care after suffering the interminable gaming scenes that pad out this movie?

Following the standard win-some, lose-some formula of The Cincinnati Kid and Rounders, Lucky You sees Huck racing against the clock to raise enough readies to enter the 2003 World Series (The year is significant, coinciding as it does with the birth of the internet poker boom and the introduction of a 'hole-card cam' that opened the tournament up to TV viewers). Trouble is, Huck loses his cool whenever Dad's around, forcing him to take ever more extreme measures to shore up his funds.

"NO WAY TO MAKE POKER CINEMATIC"

Unfortunately, Bana's selfish addict simply isn't appealing enough to make us care if he succeeds or fails. Nor do his relationships with Barrymore's naive wannabe and Duvall's smooth old-timer grip us sufficiently to justify the exorbitant running time or action that proves, like Casino Royale before it, there's no way to make poker cinematic. All in all, this drawn-out potboiler flails over two hours to generate half the crackle Robert Downey Jr does in his weirdly irrelevant, single-scene cameo as a sleazy phone-line huckster.

Lucky You is out in UK cinemas on 22nd June 2007