The Cooler (2003) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

William H Macy plays the complete loser, a guy whose luck is so bad that a Las Vegas casino uses him as a "cooler" to change the luck of a room or a player. All it takes is one touch from him, sometimes just his presence nearby, for luck to stop being a lady for a high roller with a hot hand.

What does he get as compensation for this uncanny talent? Virtually nothing. He is working as a cooler for minimal wages, in order to pay off a massive gambling debt incurred by the very bad luck which now makes him valuable. As the story begins, he is only seven days from paying off his debt, and has told the old-fashioned casino owner (Alec Baldwin), who is also his boyhood friend, that he's going to leave when his time is up.

Baldwin doesn't want his old friend and meal ticket to leave, and is so desperate to retain his "cooler" that he hires a sexy cocktail waitress to seduce the poor schmuck. Her assignment: make him fall in love, and get him to stay in Vegas, working at the Shangri-La. There is a major pitfall in Baldwin's plan - the loser and the cocktail waitress really fall in love with each other, and as soon as the loser is no longer a loser in love, his supernatural cooling ability also disappears. The vengeful Baldwin takes forceful, violent measures to split the lovers, who fight back in the hope of staying together.

Macy was born to play this role. With his hangdog face, shambling walk, and humble Midwestern demeanor, accented by the worst wardrobe in current memory, he looks like nothing more than a career retail guy, the permanent assistant night manager at a Wisconsin Wal-Mart, a lifelong bachelor so honest he is allowed to handle the receipts, but so unassertive that he never even asks for a day off. I thought the love affair between Macy and Maria Bello was completely charming. When Bello suggests that they go back to his place, Macy assumes she must be a hooker, and asserts that he can't afford her. He has no idea what to do in bed, but things work their way out eventually. No matter how well things seem to be going, Macy knows that something is bound to go wrong, just because he knows his own nature. After all, he's a man who can make a hardscrabble living by being the world's unluckiest guy, what are the chances that he'd land a major babe as a girlfriend? As it turns out, his pessimism is justified - at first.

That's a pretty good yarn to begin with, but there are several interesting sub-plots interweaving with it, the most important of which shows Baldwin's old-time casino mentality pitted against the new corporate guys who want to convert the traditional Shangri-La to the new kind of Vegas family entertainment, complete with roller coasters and day care centers. It's a great role for Baldwin, who gets to play the sympathetic angle as the noble bastion of traditional purist values fighting against the encroachment of slimy corporate conformism, but also gets to demonstrate an uncontrolled temper as the kneecap breaker. The audience hates him when he turns his anger against Macy's friends and family, but loves him when he busts the faces of the Harvard boys. At one point, the Harvard MBA tells Baldwin that he needs to incorporate a more muted color palette into the casino's wallpaper, which eventually leads to the best confrontation in the movie, in which Baldwin beats up the young wise-ass in the bathroom, and threatens to use the young man's blood on the garish green walls to create a more muted palette.

It is a modern independent film in name only. It's a cute, old-fashioned Hollywood movie at heart, a dark love story from the back alleys of film noir. Make the sex and violence implicit, take away the contemporary references, and this might easily be a script from the late 1940s or early 1950s, with Jimmy Stewart as the loser who somehow comes out ahead when he shows some backbone, and James Cagney as the good/bad casino owner.