Vince Vaughn probably doesn’t want you to know he is in Lay the Favorite, a comedy that premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival based on the memoir by Beth Raymer focusing on her time working in the sports betting industry in Las Vegas. Vaughn isn’t pictured or listed on the DVD case, nor was he listed in the press release I got in the mail with the film. However, Vaughn is in the movie and plays a role significant enough that he would likely have been listed on the packaging unless for some reason he didn’t want to be. After watching Lay the Favorite I not only understand why Vaughn might not want to be associated with the film, but I also wondered if the other actors unsuccessfully tried to do the same.
Beth Raymor (Rebecca Hall) is working as an escort in Tallahassee when she decides to change her life by moving to Las Vegas to seek her fortune. She ends up working for sports gambler Dink Heimowitz (Bruce Willis). As Beth becomes involved in Dink’s business, she becomes enamored with him — something Dink’s wife, Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones), is not happy about. Though Beth is torn between her attraction to Dink and her attraction to nice guy Jeremy (Joshua Jackson), she starts to have bigger problems than Tulip’s anger, especially once she begins working with rival gambler Rosie (Vaughn).
Gambling movies are hard to pull off. Most of the “action” is cerebral rather than physical, and there is a danger in losing the audience with too much terminology being tossed around. Yet Oscar-nominated director Stephen Fears has the chops to pull off a gambling film — in fact, he already directed a pretty good sleazy conman film, The Grifters. The script was written by D.V. DeVincentis, who wrote the script for one of Frears’ best films, High Fidelity and also co-wrote the script for Grosse Pointe Blank. So considering everyone involved this movie should work. Yet Lay the Favorite is a terribly boring movie, which is why despite its star-power it only amounted to a three-day theatrical release in 61 theaters.
So what went wrong here? First, Raymor’s memoir might have made great reading in book form, but it isn’t cinematic. Or perhaps it just isn’t in the way Fears and DeVincentis made it. This isn’t quite a comedy — it’s lighthearted but not funny — and it’s not thrilling enough to be a drama, so the film isn’t shot particularly like either. So the movie ends up being a bland mix.
Each cast member has seen much better days. Willis looks awful as a schleppy old gambler, looking like he is twice the size of what he looks like in A Good Day to Die Hard. Any movie that ends with Willis dancing to soul music is a movie filled with bad decisions on using Willis. Zeta-Jones is absolutely wasted in this role. I mean, she looks fantastic, but her character goes from raging ice queen toward Beth to warm and motherly over the course of the film with no clear explanation (As a side note, Zeta-Jones definitely needs new management: her last several films also include the bombs Broken City, Playing for Keeps, and Rock of Ages). And Jackson plays the typical nice guy milquetoast character that is in a hundred movies like this — the kind of character that unfortunately convinces men that if they’re just sugary sweet, beautiful women will eventually fall for them once they are finished being with far more interesting guys. Look, there’s not anything wrong with being a nice guy, but movies need to stop pushing the idea that all a guy has to do is be pushover nice and wait for the hot girl to eventually come around.
Which brings me to Hall. She was fine in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Frost/Nixon, and The Town, but in each of those films she was overshadowed by the leads. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it demonstrates that Hall really isn’t a lead actress at this point in her career. Her accent in this movie is grating and like Zeta-Jones her character is wildly inconsistent — she’s a bubbly airhead in some scenes, a strong-willed powerhouse in others, and a sobbing emotional wreck in others. Hall might be a lead actress someday, but this was not the film to launch that phase of her career.
Funnily enough, the most entertaining character is Vaughn’s Jewish gambler Rosie, but as I said if you look at the packaging you’d never know he was even in the movie! Vaughn brings some much-needed humor to the film, but then again that only adds to the inconsistent tone. Still, I couldn’t imagine how much worse the movie would be without him.
Everyone involved in this film is better than this and will, like Vaughn, try to forget they had anything to do with it. You should help them out with that by ignoring this movie as much as possible.
The Disc
The only special feature is eight minutes of deleted scenes — none of which add anything particularly noteworthy to the film, and none would have made the film better. They’re almost all of Rebecca Hall making various entrances and exits from scenes that remain in the movie. It would probably be more accurate to call these “trimmings.”
Movie Rating: This is a boring movie that everyone involved would be wise to leave off their resumes (2.5/10).
Disc Rating: Did you expect Radius-TWC to actually put money into making features for a movie this bad? (2/10).
Lay the Favorite will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on March 5.
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