Televised poker strikes me as something to turn to only after exhausting the offerings on the Watching Paint Dry Channel, or perhaps the Golf Channel. But many people do enjoy watching card players stare each other down on cable, and those are the people for whom Lucky You is presumably intended. Problem is, those are the only people who could possibly get any enjoyment out of this, and even a lot of them are likely to find it thin on entertainment value. Eric Bana, who has so slimmed down and overcome his Australian accent that he is now in danger of being mistaken for Patrick Duffy, stars as Huck Cheever, who makes his living playing poker in Las Vegas. He lives in the shadow of his father (Robert Duval), a former literature professor (hence his son’s name) who abandoned his family around the time he discovered high-stakes poker. Because Huck often loses as big as he wins, he’s desperately trying to raise a stake to get into the World Series of Poker,” which is just what it sounds like. The script throws him a love interest in the person of Drew Barrymore as Billie, a small-town girl come to work as a singer in Vegas. There’s some nonsense about Billie and Huck sharing the ability to read people’s feelings but using them to different ends, and about Huck’s tensions regarding his recently returned father, but the only thing this film has any interest in is photographing poker matches. And while a certain amount of audience oohing and ahhing during the interminable final match indicates that those with a taste for the subject may find this engrossing, I can’t help but question the appeal of watching a fictional gambling match. And that this dull-as-dishwater drama says nothing about the emotional and psychic dangers of obsessive gambling is a black eye for director Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential, Wonder Boys) and writer Eric Roth (The Insider, The Good Shepherd), for both of whom this serves as a career low point. Did they lose a bet or something?

Molly Shannon is a funny-looking actress, which I do not mean in an unkind way. With her big teeth and needle nose, you look at her on screen and think, “Aha, here is someone who is going to make me laugh.” I presume that is why Mike White, here moving from screenwriter (Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl) into the director’s chair, cast her in the lead role of this, a movie that wants to keep you guessing whether you’re supposed to be laughing at it, with it or not laughing at all. She plays Peggy, who works as a secretary in a real estate firm and has carefully structured her life as a single woman. She has minimal human relationships with her co-workers, and with her brother and his wife and children, but generally reserves her emotional involvement to her beagle, Pencil. (Not in a nasty way: That would be the Bobcat Goldthwaite-directed Sleeping Dogs Lie you’re thinking of.) When Pencil meets an untimely and unexpected death, Peggy is left with an emotional void that she struggles to fill, in ways that lead her to learn about her true nature. I write this having seen the entire film, but let me tell you, watching it proceed I had no idea where it was going. White directs in a purposely static manner, with his actors geometrically arranged in the camera eye: Neither they nor the camera ever moves, giving us the impression of watching specimens under a microscope. (Much of the film consists of cutaway shots to Peggy listening to the petty obsessions of other people, which gives us the uncomfortable feeling of being the specimens under her microscope.) As Peggy’s life gets progressively messier, the film seems to be heading into the territory of Todd Solandz (Happiness), albeit without the really shocking stuff. And while I will do you the favor of telling you that Peggy eventually pulls herself together, for a while her decline makes for discomfiting viewing (no surprise to anyone who recalls White’s own performance in Chuck and Buck). The net result is a film that develops such an aura of creepiness that its feel-good finale does little to wash away that vibe.