Look in my eyes, I am the only mirror you're ever gonna need.

I thought The Cooler was going to be a fun character ride. It starts out with William H. Macy having supernatually bad luck, but the premise is he falls in love and his luck goes from terrible to great. This poses problems at work though, since his job is to be around people who are winning so his bad luck rubs off and they start losing.

Early on this fun ride theory was affirmed. The colors are bright, the style of the shots when he first shows his bad luck in action fit as well. But it doesn't take too long for the movie to turn dark. Pretty soon while the colors are still light and some of the moments are light, this ends up being a dark, dark Vegas movie. Alec Baldwin (who was deservedly nominated for a Supporting Actor Acedemy Award ) gets some emotional sympathy for his character by longing for the old school ways before the camp took over Vegas. But then we see that he's also a fan of the old school ways of dealing with people who owe debts.

The three main characters (Macy, Baldwin, and the girl) are all fundamentally depressing. They're lonely, and don't really have lives I envy. This leads to part of the darkness, especially since Macy and the girl's romantic love seems to mostly be built on a basis of the two of them being the first people in a long time to treat the other like a decent person. It's sad when that is dramitic improvement from the usual.

But as a dark movie about Vegas and this wierd guy as a cooler, it's excellent. Just don't expect it to be uplifting.

Side note: I also had some trouble watching Ron Livingston in this role. He's so ingrained in my head as his character from Office Space that I have a hard time watching him in anything else now. I've been working through Band Of Brothers where I've had the same problem (I TiVo'd the series when the History Channel played them a few weeks ago and have been slowly watching them.)

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