The Cooler | Review

What’s the point in rolling the dice if you already know the outcome?

I’m not sure how this went any further than script form, but Wayne Kramer’s directorial debut tries to be the type of refreshingly slick, B-flick romantic adult drama–but what this ends up becoming is a game of poker where each card hand gets increasingly worse without any ace in sight. If The Cooler is a film about bad karma, it certainly feels as if some it seeped into the making of the film—it’s as if the potential for a shady, artificial world and the novel idea of such a “cooler” was replaced for a polished look and empty narrative.

With a cast of one dimensional characters, a dismal ending that feeds off a faux noir texture but never becomes what it intends to be, some poorly recycled dialogue and perhaps the first performance from actor William H. Macy (Fargo) which I would categorize as synthetic, this drama is not as clever as it aspires to or appears to be. With florescent lights beaming out of slot machines of the Shangri-La this is the final stop in the cigarette-smoke stained carpets of a last of the dinosaur-aged casinos– it seems like a fitting place for the newest movie anti-hero, Bernie (Macy) who is such a loser that his job title requires him just to show up at a table on command and simply exist.

What could become a fairly complex idea for a character gets a lighter treatment, Kramer spends the entire first act giving us the persona of “shitty luck incarnated”,–that is until one waitress with stretch marks played by Maria Bello (Auto Focus) strolls into the picture. From here onto the end there is this shift of luck inside this three person paradigm, while Bernie finally gets some cream for his coffee we have the casino boss Shelley, Alec Baldwin (Along Came Polly) act as a teacher of sorts for “lessons in life” in the casino business. Baldwin pulls one from the Glengarry Glen Ross playbook of wicked one-liners with an attitude; unfortunately, in almost in every single scene he’s in we get him rambling on about how the old school was the way to go—repetitiveness in this character kind of takes away from Baldwin’s performance.

With a couple of confused subplots—the whole estranged son scam thing is slightly overdone and Paul Sorvino’s (Goodfellas) two-minute entrée incomprehensibly evaporates leaving more time for hotel room beatings and not much more. The Cooler’s most interesting sequence, is peppered with the sort of authenticism that is lacking in on-screen one night stands–Macy is far from buff and lasts all but fifteen seconds and Bello has no super-model figure, – but while the scene stands out for its honesty it fails to ignite the rest of the tempo of the film with the same intangible flair. For a better casino movie check out Hard Eight, and for a better film that plugs in similar themes check out the import (Intacto), for the mean time weigh the odds of a Golden Globe win for this unworthy film.

Rating 1.5 stars