[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
In Theaters Friday, April 4, 2025
A fascinating story stocked with interesting characters inside of an exciting setting, The Luckiest Man in America has to work hard at being as bad as it is. It’s no easy feat, but at every step along the way, co-writer/director Samir Oliveros seems determined to make the wrong decision, and it’s a habit that haunts the effort from the first frame right up to its last.
Based on real events in 1984 Los Angeles, the film opens with Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) bluffing his way through a pre-taping interview for Press Your Luck, a daytime CBS gameshow. Chuck (Shamier Anderson), the casting director, gets a weird vibe from Larson but is overruled by producer/show creator Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), who feels Larson’s awkward nature and pudgy appearance will appeal to the show’s core demographic. And while Larson is a bit out of his element once the show’s taping begins and host Peter Tomarken (Walton Goggins) starts winding up him and the other contestants, the guy is harboring a secret.
A VCR and weeks of careful study have revealed five distinct patterns on the show’s computer-programmed game board, allowing Larson to predict with certainty what are assumed to be random occurrences. As Larson racks up money in a seemingly improbable string of lucky “spins” on the show, Carruthers and other studio execs scramble to figure out what’s going on, and how to stop it. And though he seems to be in control of the uncontrollable, Larson begins to feel the pressure of the experience as his win total grows, finding himself dangerously distracted by encroaching thoughts of his family.
The premise is an interesting one served well by real-life drama that fiction can’t improve (despite this script’s dubious efforts at just that). The actual event is the rare, knowable example of a perfect crime, as Larson did nothing wrong by simply paying very close attention to previous episodes, using that available knowledge to earn money in a legitimate enterprise. But the script doesn’t bring the audience in on the process of the trick until Chuck and Carruthers piece everything together, robbing the movie of the fun of the central conceit until about halfway through its 90-minute runtime, when it pivots to focus on Larson’s inner turmoil.
Indeed, Oliveros is less interested in the “heist” elements of the event, and more in the man behind it. Were this a movie about more than just the two days Larson spends on the CBS lot, that might have been interesting, but in choosing to stick with the man during just this period, the script neuters itself in both character and story. Because The Luckiest Man in America begins and ends on the show, none of the character drama has a baseline, leaving the audience nothing to gauge the events against. And because there’s no look into Larson’s process while prepping for his appearance (i.e., timing the playing board’s patterns), there’s no real buy-in to be had by a viewer as it relates to the action of the gameshow.
This is like if Ocean’s 11 started and ended with the heist itself, or if The Great Escape just featured the breakout, and neither showed anything that took place before or after. And while Hauser should be commended for bringing the pathos that he does to the lead role, he’s fighting an uphill battle, and what little background the script reveals is never enough to get the audience to root for him, let alone care. All of the other characters are reactionary, and don’t exist as real people outside of their immediate connection to the events on-screen, wasting good performances from Strathairn, Goggins, and Anderson.
The production and costume design do good work bringing the world alive, though again, the script throws up roadblocks even here, like dropping a mention of America’s Most Wanted a full three years before it premiered. And yeah, the cast is a great one…so great that Oliveros and the script don’t seem to know what to do with all of them. No one suffers more in this regard than Maisie Williams, a Press Your Luck production assistant that the movie seems to lose track of in the third act after setting her up as Larson’s handler of sorts.
In real life, Michael Larson got to keep all of his winnings because he had done nothing wrong, but he blew through it all in short order and spent the rest of his life chasing other get-rich-quick schemes: none of which panned out. If Oliveros and the script really were more interested in the man than the event, it stands to reason that they would have explored these contradictions of character more, probing ideas about what made him successful in this one thing, but a failure everywhere else. Like the effort as a whole, it feels like a missed opportunity, and a tease of a better movie hiding somewhere in the margins of this one.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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