Seven Times Lucky 
Directed & Written by: Gary Yates
Starring: Kevin Pollack, Liane Balaban, Jonas Chernick, James Tolkan, Aleks Paunovic, Babs Chula, Gordon Tootoosis
Country: Canada

            

Two Fake Rolaxes [sic]

Reviewed by Hal Gray

Don't Get Conned.

Everybody loves a slick flick where the grifters grift the grifters and the conners get conned and the down-and-out hero has one good con left in him and escapes with the loot while the tootsie that could have had him gets hers in the end. The talk is tough and snappy and always means more than one thing. The action is quick and the story twists and turns like a slimy snake. It's a genre specialty noirishly developed in the dark shadows before, during and after WWII and loved by moviegoers who realized the world was gray after all but who wanted a black and white ending just the same. Our naïveté lost for good, noir film has deliciously been revisited over the decades.

Of course, The Maltese Falcon (noir noir, 1941) comes to mind. Some other notables (among hundreds) are The Sting (Hollywood noir, 1973), The Grifters (neo-noir, 1990) and Nueva Reinas (Latin neo-noir, 2000). And now, but not so notably, we have for want of a better term, hoser noir. Seven Times Lucky, a film by Canadian Gary Yates shot in Winnipeg, never quite gets it right.

The story: Harlan, a long-in-the-tooth small-time grifter does something stupid by betting someone else's money on a ‘sure thing'. He loses. In financial hot water, he sets out to pay the money back by getting involved in a bigger con, but he manages to screw that up too. To make matters worse, he pines after Fiona, a trick half his age who's just learning the biz. Whenever Harlan gets his nose out in front, Fiona's duplicity cuts it off. Finally Harlan has to go to an underlord for a loan to pull his irons out of the fire. Now he's in real trouble when he can't pay the loan back. There's some bits about cash, (real) Rolex watches, a hoary violin and switched suitcases. In the end…well, read the first sentence of the review. (I'm not giving anything away, as a grift story depends 1% on the end result and 99% on getting there.) So what went wrong?

In this stagy production the talk is tough, but none of the tough guys (except for Mr. Five Wounds' personal bodyguard who smelled tough) are, well, tough. I didn't believe they were tough guys for a minute. And that's tough. The talk is also not snappy and it never means more than it says. It simply pedantically moves the plot along—nothing else.

With the exception of Harlan, who has money and Fiona's love to lose, everybody's pretty much as you see them: Fiona; her speed-freak boyfriend, Sonny; his Neanderthal pal; Eddie, Harlan's patron; and the crime boss, Mr. Five Wounds all go out the same way they came in. There's no character shading and thus little interest in how things turn out for them. Harlan's not easy to care for either. He carries one subliminally pained expression throughout. What's going on behind the inscrutability? What's at stake for him? We never find out. Worse, Yates decides to let the camera linger over this sad-sack mug on countless occasions. These moments become glacial, killing any momentum the flow might have.

Little set decoration and costume inconsistencies have the same effect. This is a world of fedoras, rotary phones and boat-size Cadillacs. Then you're wondering where did that ATM or cell phone or jacket come from and you've missed the next line. Unfortunately the cell phone becomes a necessary major plot device and in the hands of a minor character to boot. Harlan, the hero, never really solves his own problem.

Kevin Pollack as Harlan does have a nice screen presence, but he doesn't have a lot to do here. His actions are so conservative throughout the story that his rash act of betting someone else's wad at the beginning doesn't make sense. However, his short impersonation as a Phil Collins look-and-sound-alike jewel fence is well done. Liane Balaban as Fiona runs into the tough problem mentioned above. (Yeah, dames can be tough, too.) She just ain't. Balaban mumbles and minces her lines and when she points a gun at Harlan and says, "I'll shoot," you know she couldn't. (Harlan believes her. Ouch!) The screen chemistry between the two doesn't register. Jonas Chernick as Sonny is thinly drawn and annoying in a bad way.

All of the major participants of Seven Times Lucky—in front of and behind the camera—are talented artists and have done good work before. In my view, this one just got away from them starting with the original idea.

Compare this review to Hal's review of Criminal (archives, 2004), a moderately successful grifter flick that succeeds at main character development in and about the action.