Luckytown (2000)

Best movie of this year hands down!

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Lidda (Kirsten Dunst) leaves Tulsa, Oklahoma and her mother to find her father Charlie Doyles (James Caan), a professional gambler in Vegas. She carries around a check from him. She takes store clerk Colonel (Vincent Kartheiser) along for the ride when somebody comes collecting his debt. Colonel considers himself to be a poker player. Charlie faces old nemesis Tony in high stakes poker. Charlie is in love with stripper Sugar working in Tony's club. Jimmy works for Tony to rob and then kill gamblers. Tony's nephew Frankie arrives from Italy to be the new member of the crew.This movie is very clunky. Nobody is particularly compelling. Kirsten is grumpy and Vincent is no leading man. They don't have any chemistry. James Caan is coasting on his reputation in this movie. Luis Guzmán is a passable hit-man but he's capable of much more. This is trying to be a hard-boiled crime drama and personal drama. It doesn't have the style or any good writing. It doesn't have any thrills or tension. It stumbles on and on as the audience waits for Lidda to finally meet up with Charlie.

Do not watch this movie before operating heavy machinery. Though technically competent in many respects, Luckytown is positively soporific. It is dull and slow and lifeless. Kirsten Dunst is cutely sunny as always, but James Caan spends the entire film looking and sounding like he needs a megadose of anti-depressants. I almost had to jab myself in the groin with a hot cigarette lighter to stay awake through this thing.Charlie Doyles (James Caan) is an aging gambler who's returned to Las Vegas to take on his old rival Tony DeCarlo (Robert Miano) in a high stakes, underground poker game. Lidda (Kirsten Dunst) is Charlie's teenage daughter. He ran out on Lidda and her trashy mother years ago, leaving them in Tulsa, Oklahoma of all places. Now on her 18th birthday, Lidda runs away from home to find her dad in Vegas. Along the way, she picks up Colonel (Vincent Kartheisen), a long-haired teenage loser who fancies himself the world's greatest poker player. Yes, his actual name is Colonel. No, they never explain what the deal is with that.As Lidda and Colonel do their thing of young love and Charlie and Tony dance through their brutally simplistic conflict, there are three other characters who kind of wander around until they end up dead. There's Sugar (Jennifer Gareis), a stripper who used to screw Charlie, is now screwing Tony and pretty much screws every man she meets as substitute for small talk. Rounding things out are Jimmy (Luis Guzman) and Frankie (Frederico Da Vinci), two thugs who work for Tony and hang around being all ironic and stuff about being murderous criminals.Luckytown has a lot of naked female breasts and Dunst is always enjoyable. Those are the only good qualities of the movie. The rest isn't aggressively horrible, it's just boring as all get out. There's no energy to anything that happens here. Showing 105 minutes of an old man sleeping on a park bench would have more excitement and intensity. Much of the blame for that can be placed on Caan, who sleepwalks through every scene and monotones his way through every line. But the script by Brandon Beseth is devoid of interest and the direction of Paul Nicholas never establishes a pace or a sense of importance.Yes, Dunst does end up as a stripper at one point. No, she doesn't take off her clothes. There is a scene where she's briskly walking and you can see the boobs under her shirt bounce up and down with enough force to kill a small mouse.The only thing this film has to offer is that it might be able to cure a case of insomnia. Apart from cinema's contribution to holistic medicine, there's nothing else here.

As a movie, the movie sucked. It sucked in the kind of dismally bad way that only the laziest of movies can. The young male romantic interest of Kirsten Dunst ranks high in the pantheon of Characters that Should Be Killed As Soon As Possible With a Blunt Instrument - he is as likeable as the Dell Guy.However, the only reason I write is to comment on the poker scene, which takes the cake for spectacular laziness. For a movie involving two characters who are supposed to be the top two greatest poker players in the world, it would be nice if the writer had actually bothered to peruse the rudimentary structure of poker games.In the scene where James Caan plays the kid at poker, Caan is playing Texas Hold'em. The kid, however, is apparently playing 5-card draw. Caan's TWO cards face down are pocket Queens. That's unfortunate for him, because the kid has FIVE cards in his hand, which contain at least trip deuces. Let's make sure we got that. In the same hand of poker, one guy is playing a completely different form of poker than the other!! HA HA HA HA HA HA. When I saw this, I sat in stunned, giggly disbelief.This is not a little error. It is unforgiveable sloppiness, especially when you bill your movie as a Vegas, gambling movie that involves the two greatest poker players in the world. It's as if a 5th grader wrote this. If it were a sports movie, it would be like one guy playing his golf shot while his opponent, a football player, tackles him. Retarded. Just like the entire surrounding movie.

This moive was the biggest piece of trash and I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF ITI loved it in that guilty pleasure sort of way... in that 2 AM in the morning and you're looking for an excuse to stay awake kind of way... hoping against hope that Kirsten will finally take off her clothes, glory in her newfound abilities with the pole and dump her wussy boyfriend. I am disappointed to report, none of these things happenHowever, Luis Guzman kicks some ass. A surly Robert Miano (Donnie Brasco) nails the hell out of some MAXIM covergirl. Kirsten does make a pretty decent stripper.On the other hand, the direction in this movie is awful. The writer, Brenden Beseth, stumbles between Bukowski and illiteracy. The punk who plays the lead should never be allowed to act (yeah right) again. However, I liked the movie. So many films are unintentionally terrible, that this film is almost satisfying. It's not trying to elevate above the shoddy source material. It's not pretending to be anything that it's not...Luckytwn is just A BLOODY VEGAS ROMP. A little film outclassed by its heavyweight movie stars...a guilty pleasure to say the least....