Movies based in Las Vegas are usually full of Vegas clichés but “The Cooler” manages to corner almost every conceivable one.
William H. Macy has a face that is at once sad and underappreciated at the same time. The perennial underdog, if you will. How many times has he had roles where he played a loser (remember Boogie Nights?) or a poor schmuck (Fargo)? I have seriously lost count. You can just hear casting directors going, "You need a poor schmuck who is also a loser in your movie? Well, what are we waiting for? Get me Bill Macy´s agent!" Talk about being typecast! The problem for Macy, if you can call it that, is that no one can play an underdog better than he can. He is the character actor every moviegoer loves to embrace or take pity on.
So here we are, with the William H. Macy-helmed film "The Cooler", a movie that opened as recently as late November 2003, grossing a little over $8.2 million and change to date. If not for the just-concluded Academy Awards where Alec Baldwin´s performance in this film earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination, I can bet that not many would have heard of this movie, let alone see it. Macy gets the lead role in "The Cooler" but does his luck change this time around? I would have to answer yes--twice--to that question.
Away from the glitz and glamour of the famous Las Vegas Strip, lies an aging casino, the Shangri-La, run the old-fashioned way by an old-Vegas tough guy, Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin). To keep the casino profitable, Shelly employs an old-school method to cool down gamblers with hot streaks. This is where Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) comes in. You see, Bernie is perhaps the unluckiest guy in Vegas and Shelly knows that. Winners start dropping like flies the moment Bernie walks by the tables, as amusingly shown in the opening sequence. It is as if Typhoid Mary just came through the casino. Bernie´s backstory is that after running up a large tab at the Shangri-La, Shelly decides to spare his life (but not after kneecapping him) by making him work as the casino´s "cooler", a job that Bernie is very effective at. With Bernie, we find Macy in a familiar role yet again--a sad sack with a heart of gold. Even Bernie´s last name, Lootz, sounds like loser. So how is "The Cooler" different from any of the other Macy movies? Well, this time around he plays a romantic lead as well. And a damn fine one too.
When we first meet Bernie, he has a week to go before his debt is paid in full to Shelly and his immediate plan is to high tail out of Vegas as fast as possible. Obviously, Shelly´s not very happy about losing his best "cooler". Enter Natalie (Maria Bello), a struggling waitress at the Shangri-La who inadvertently falls in love with Bernie. Now, Bernie is not the kind of guy that usually has women, let alone attractive women, falling for him. He is so resigned to his miserable fate that his own self-deprecating pessimism eggs him on to question Natalie´s sudden "interest" in him. But fall for him she does and probably for the first time in his life, Bernie is starting to feel good about himself, gaining some self-esteem and confidence and probably a bounce in his steps along the way. However, this is when Bernie´s real problems start. A loser to the core, this guy just can´t catch a break! To have someone actually loving him for whom he really is, Bernie´s luck begins to change for the better and it unfortunately spills over into his work. Having the opposite effect than before, patrons at the casino actually start winning when Bernie goes on his daily "cooling" rounds.
As if Shelly doesn´t have enough problems dealing with Bernie, the shady partners of the casino has sent Larry Sokolov (Ron Livingston) to shake things up at the Shangri-La. Larry envisions a glitzy Shangri-La with three floors of gaming and to top off Shelly´s misery, a roller coaster. So, here we have old school versus new school, with each trying to wrest control of the joint. Shelly obviously does not want to have anything to do with these proposed changes. Needing to keep the profits flowing in order to show that his old way of running a casino still works, Shelly desperately wants to keep Bernie from leaving.
To muddle things further, Bernie´s good-for-nothing son Mikey (Shawn Hatosy) shows up with his pregnant girlfriend, Charlene (Estelle Warren), asking for money to support their unborn child. You can see Mikey working his old man from a mile away but Bernie, wrought by guilt for not being there for him when he was younger, doesn´t even think twice about forking over $3,000 at the drop of a hat. As you might have already guessed, Mikey later winds up at the Shangri-La putting dear old Dad´s money to good use by cheating at the crap table.
Movies based in Las Vegas are usually full of Vegas clichés but "The Cooler" manages to corner almost every conceivable one. There are the con movies, the struggling showgirl/waitress movies, the mobster movies, the guy who is down-on-his-luck movies and of course, the roll-of-the-dice gambling movies. "The Cooler" attempts to incorporate a lot of these different bits into its plot but unfortunately does not excel in any of them. It can´t decide whether it wants to be a romantic comedy, a romantic drama or even a twisted love story. The film should have stuck to its original premise of a fairy tale-like story where a man´s luck is forever changed by true love without having to add some extra elements that are only token distractions. For instance, the subplot that involves Bernie´s son Mikey disappears abruptly halfway through the film, has no lasting consequences and certainly does not add a single thing to the film. Its intended outcome is to give Shelly a reason to force Bernie to stay on but using Natalie for that purpose would have been a better option. Also, as the history of Shelly´s previously close relationship with Bernie--they used to run cons together--is revealed in bits and pieces, it just doesn´t make sense for Bernie not to despise Shelly for what he has done to his life. For crying out loud, the man even kneecapped him to teach him a lesson! What a friend, huh? Bernie may be the nicest guy in Vegas but come on!
Average user rating (1-5):