dbholt_99
Indeed, dumb. But don't blame the writer--he had written a kick ass script before this clumsy director got involved and made him re-write it 2-3 times and sucked all the life out of it. The original script was great and had Martin Sheen set to play Charlie. The writer, fresh out of UCLA, was set to direct it. At the last minute the funding dried up and one of the actors got the script to Paul, who then took over as director. He was flush with money from a German media company. He pushed Brendan aside as director and this mess was created. Probably destroyed the confidence (and career) of a promising young writer in the process.
MBunge
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.
The_Great_And_Powerful_OZ
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....
fairygirl411
This movie is so dumb. The James Caan parts of it are a lame excuse for soft-core porn and pseudo-gangster antics. The Kirsten Dunst/Vincent Kartheiser parts have the potential to be really, really good -- good dialogue building a truly interesting relationship. BUT. Kirsten's acting sucks -- it just sucks in every way possible. They have no chemistry.
The character of Lidda (Dunst) wasn't "bad" enough for me -- she wasn't much of anything, it was like she was reading her lines and had no clue what was going on. Vincent Kartheiser's Colonel was just about the only believable character -- I liked Colonel a lot. But it didn't help the film much.I didn't appreciate the none-too-subtly cloaked symbolism (i.e. the "Second Chance Motel," the whole movie happening on and around Valentine's Day). The ending was also stupid -- it's supposed to be optimistic, a "fresh start," but PLEASE. You know she's going to keep smoking, and he's going to keep gambling, and they'll get sick of each other really fast and break up again. It didn't convince me.
