No whammies

THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA

2025

Directed by Samir Oliveros

Written by Amanda Freeman, Maggie Briggs, and Samir Oliveros

Spoilers: moderate (though, in a grander sense, N/A)

The Luckiest Man In America is the kind of movie you like to see arise from the indie wilds of the 2020s: a true story that, happily, confines itself to a very small slice of basically real-time action, to be completed within 90 minutes including credits and focusing essentially solely upon the process of discovering the unexpected results of a dynamic figure crashing into complacent dopes, and because that real-time action was the filming of (what became) two adjoining episodes of the classic CBS game show, Press Your Luck, it has an automatically compelling gimmick, such as, also, comes with its own production and costume design more-or-less laid out for it already—though by the same token I'm not sure that frontloading production designer Lulu Salgado and costume designer Carolina Serna's names to the first sentence of the first paragraph of a review, before any other principal has even been mentioned, isn't anything but the fairest way to do it.  Anyway, Luckiest Man comes off like nothing more (but nothing less) than a collection of small, smart moves on the part of, well, all its craftspeople, including its director, a fellow by the name of Samir Oliveros whose only previous feature credit is a movie I've never heard of, 2017's Bad Lucky Goat (some manner of dramedy), though if I'm implying I've heard of any of these people other than the top-of-the-B-list "gets" of its superbly-chosen cast, I'm not.

It concerns itself with a certain Michael Larson, whose principal claim to fame was breaking Press Your Luck.  "Cheating" would be going much too far—all Larson had to do was exploit its makers' blatantly-exploitable game design, to the point that it's no wonder that Press Your Luck wasn't on the air for two seasons before somebody came along to reap the whirlwind they'd so obviously sown—but it was sufficiently humiliating for CBS that, although they aired the episodes, they only aired them once, going so far as to remove them from syndication packages, and in so doing turning them into (slightly) lost media, only making the scandal of them more enticing.  Altogether, the smallness is the selling point here, this news of the weird item from 1984 that, because that's so long ago now, has fermented into real broadcast TV legendry.  There are clear downsides to trying to make a movie (or even a story) out of this interesting but deeply unimportant piece of social history, but Oliveros and his co-writer Maggie Briggs (Amanda Freeman also got a "story by" credit) have figured out successful-enough ways to do so, not least being aware than the achievement itself is what their movie is "about" and so, to some degree, staying out of the way of simply watching Larson make good television.

So, although that summarizes it to a degree you almost wouldn't believe, what we have is our Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser), who has absconded on what looks like a pretty manic whim to Los Angeles, CA, from Lebanon, OH, driving his ice cream truck across the continent so that he can squeeze himself into the contestants' line-up for Press Your Luck.  His initial move is to scam his way into an audition under another aspirant's name, which is unsuccessful, but Press Your Luck creator and showrunner Bill Carruthers* (David Strathairn) takes pity on him, and—against the instincts of his lieutenant Chuck (Shamier Anderson; we have now arrived, I believe, at fictional characters)—Bill gives him a place on the show.  Turns out Chuck was right to judge Michael suspicious: as soon as he answers trivia questions sufficient to get his "spin" at the flashing big board—the part of the game (I was not familiar with Press Your Luck when I arrived at the theater) where you hit the button to halt the allegedly "random" sequence of selector lights, either earning yourself a fat prize, a fat prize along with extra spins, or the dreaded "whammy" which robs you of all you've won so far—Michael is statistically-improbably hitting nearly nothing but prizes, and usually prizes plus spins, over and over, much to awed amazement of host Peter Tomarken (Walton Goggins), and the dawning horror of Bill and Chuck and everybody else who are going to lose their jobs if they don't figure out how he's doing this pronto.

That's kind of it, and I tell you, I loved the movie anyway.  But I did mention that there were big honking drawbacks to any attempt to narrativize this tale, and we get to the first one pretty quickly: Michael's not actually cheating them, which means that his process is not actually narratively interesting; all he's done is merely realized, from the careful examination of tapes of the show, that Press Your Luck's prize board only uses five patterns.  (That's right, five: it's absurd that they thought they could get away with it, though it's maybe a pity the movie doesn't have space to explain that it was more negligence than true stupidity—they of course knew that five would be insufficient for the long haul, but it was a corner they'd cut for the underbudgeted pilot episode, and it was easy to ignore until Larson showed up, and they just never got back 'round to fixing it till he did.)  But, either way, what that means is that Michael is simply playing the game.  There's no skullduggery to his endless victories, neither some technological manipulation nor a conspiracy.  Even his compulsive desire to make phone calls during the filming breaks—prohibited by broadcast standards and practices, even, so what nefarious plot is this villain hatching here?—is entirely to the side of the "scam," in that he just really does want to call his daughter on her birthday, this being about the only thing he wasn't lying about.  And so we run into the other obstacle to making a movie out of this, which is that Michael Larson, the real-life personage, seems to offer up the rude material of a folk hero—"screwing over a big media company without breaking a single rule," is, you must admit, pretty cool—which is why it's unfortunate that he was an asshole, with a checkered history comprised of uglier scams that hurt regular folks, and if that wouldn't be enough, he also seemed to be sort of insane, more like a collection of pathological impulses to take unfair advantage regardless of the circumstance (or the victim) than someone you would even slightly admire, and whose zany schemes themselves make his triumph over CBS kind of seem like a fluke of a good idea.  (After his appearance on Press Your Luck, he went back to his old ways, and—so I've heard it told—he tried to scam a radio DJ contest that involved giving prizes to anyone who had a bank note with the serial numbers the DJ would announce during his show; but Larson's plan, this time, was to convert his cash holdings into one dollar bills, and leaving aside how the hell he ever expected to check their serial numbers against the winning number in real time, his plan had an Achilles heel as obvious as Press Your Luck's, as became apparent when his house got robbed.  The saving grace was that because he had so many notes, the culprit only got away with half his stash.  To be fair, I don't know if any of that is real.)

The screenplay, which does still have some vestigial need for a narrative arc, has elected to lean into this but only so much, making Michael an exploitative user, but he feels sad about that, and that's good enough, I suppose, though there's only so much a film this intent on being a procedural set on a game show can do in pursuing a character study, let alone of a character whose entire psychology seems to consist of a personality disorder; and then there's only so much procedural you can get out of a procedural set on a game show where the procedure is just "pattern recognition," so the actual meat of the procedural lies instead with Bill and Chuck who have to figure out what Michael's doing, whether or not there's anything they can do to stop him, and, since there isn't, how to politick this to their bosses.  This isn't that much procedure either, given that—not to spoil anything!—at no point does CBS, for instance, attempt Michael Larson's assassination.  The curious thing is the movie, which does still need to hit 90 minutes, will feint towards a more dangerous tack, most usefully as Chuck attempts to employ the information he's dug up about Michael's past to rattle him psychologically, though mostly it's only as a form of directorial play, where Oliveros follows Michael running about the CBS studio and having some manner of breakdown where he perceives not only physical threat but a complete unwinding of his reality.  There's a whole go-nowhere sequence where he wanders onto a talk show set, fleeing extras from a cop show, to be interviewed by some mental projection of his own, that completely dispenses with any objective reality, and even though I don't necessarily disapprove of this—I might have approved of more of this, let's just get tacky and nuts, why not?—it can only feel like a weird unhammered nail (or padding) here, when Luckiest Man isn't really built to be a psychothriller, because it's barely "an actual story" at all, and more "a neat factoid."

It is, however, built to be a just-plain-thriller, and when the movie shines, it's not so much as a story of why or even how Michael Larson executed his scheme, but just as an experiential dive into what it must've felt like to behold this guy defy the odds long enough that you stopped being amazed and started getting pissed.  (I would also describe the movie as "a comedy.")  Despite this true story having been kicked around as a potential film for some decades now (at one point, ages ago, and for a completely separate project, Bill Murray was going to play Larson), I don't know if it works without Paul Walter Hauser, who already has more physical resemblance to Larson than your usual actor (and moreso in his Santa Claus-esque get-up here), and who's leaning into his ability to be a strange and awkward presence while injecting enough of a sense of encroaching paranoia (this would make a real good double-feature with Richard Jewell) that you feel sympathetic towards him, despite Hauser not letting us anywhere near an understanding of Michael, only ever playing up the affable enigma because an affable enigma is, perhaps, all that's even there.  It's certainly compelling viewing for 90 minutes.

It's extremely compelling viewing when we're with him on the turntable stage on Press Your Luck, and this is why I started by praising the film's craft.  At absolute bottom, this is a movie about turning Press Your Luck into a vision of hell, taking advantage of how walking onto the set of "the most Vegas gameshow in America" (if I remember the tagline) already looks like reality's collapsed, priming us with a credits sequence that's basically just a digital simulacrum of the most utterly abstract backlit animation, and punching that as far as possible in cinematographer Pablo Lozano's treatment of the soundstage as garish colors throbbing inside looming shadows that constantly threaten to swallow back up the light they've regurgitated, with Goggins playing his host as, essentially, a talking cardboard standee, and Hauser laughing garrulously until he stops to stare daggers at the board or to peer over an obstruction, and Anderson and Strathairn freaking out in their distinctive registers, all while editor Sebastian Hernandez is cutting Michael's winning streak into feverish impressionism and, maybe above all, John Carroll Kirby's electronic score is wailing at you, turning the board bleeps and boops into integral structural components of "music" that's built more than anything around whirring noises meant to evoke a Shepard tone and sound like the instrumentation might actually have been some kind of turbine.  The Luckiest Man In America is fundamentally just a calling card, maybe, a demonstration that its principals can make movies and make them extraordinarily well as a matter of form and imposing an emotional response onto its audience, and so, in a sense, it's a fairly mechanical exercise; but what I appreciate is that it's not trying to fool you or worse, itself, into thinking it's something profound—you don't even have to leave "recreation of classic television released in the last year" to find Late Night With the Devil and realize how full of itself a technical exercise can become and how easily it can run out of ideas.  There's a low ceiling to how good something like this can be, but it's aware of the pitfalls, and I had fun, which is all I ever asked of it.

Score: 7/10 

*Who also created The Dating Game, so this is a firm reminder that I need to make some time to watch Anna Kendrick's own small-scale directorial exercise in the Bill Carruthers Cinematic Universe, Woman of the Hour.