The Cooler
Director: Wayne Kramer
Year Released: 2003
Rating: 0.5
Intolerably dumb film of Las Vegas becoming an adult Disney World and casino co-owner Alec Baldwin's refusal to modernize - for example, he resorts to using mystical methods of making people lose, like hiring lifelong failures like William H. Macy to stand around the winners so that their hot streaks end. It seems as if everyone that comes to gamble at Baldwin's casino is a complete scumbag, so that when they gloat and start cheering when they're winning it makes it more 'acceptable' for Baldwin and his cronies to, say, break parts of their bodies. There's a lot of unnecessary nudity and violence and is quite weak as a representation of the "real" Vegas (i.e. off the Strip) - it's designed as an attempt to respond to Ocean's Eleven's PG-rated hip-ness and slickness (and the way Soderbergh's picture more or less "glorifies" Sin City) but does not have one scintilla of that movie's energy.
