Luck – Pilot Episode Review (Contains Spoilers)
Welcome to Chester Bernstein’s world. Better known as Ace, Bernstein is fresh out of jail and ready to get back to business. His business? Horse racing and gambling. He owns a track and his friend Gus has just bought a horse.
This is Luck, HBO’s latest high-profile show and another coup for arguably America’s best television network. Following the huge success of Boardwalk Empire, HBO has again teamed a Hollywood star and a Hollywood director up to launch a new show. In Boardwalk Empire it was Steve Buscemi and Martin Scorsese. In Luck it’s Dustin Hoffman and Michael Mann.
Dustin Hoffman has only previously appeared on television in a TV movie version of Death Of A Salesman, but is now Ace Bernstein, one of the main characters in Luck. Mann has directed movies like Heat, Collateral and Public Enemies, but has more of a track record in television, having directed LA Takedown (essentially a low-budget dress rehearsal for Heat) and been an executive producer on Miami Vice. In addition to having a star lead and director, Luck was created by David Milch, creator of critically acclaimed TV shows NYPD Blue and Deadwood.
Elsewhere in the first episode of the show, four losers are looking to make it big at the track. They believe they have inside information on certain races, and are looking to win a couple of million dollars with an accumulator bet. Marcus (Kevin Dunn), Lonnie (Ian Hart), Renzo (Ritchie Coster) and Jerry (Jason Gedrick) are those four losers, but their lives could be about to change if their picks all win their races.
Away from the racing, Walter Smith (Nick Nolte) is an ageing horse trainer with a new horse he thinks might be very special indeed. A young female Irish jockey called Rosie is riding Gettn’up morning for him in practise sessions, and she is eager to impress him enough to allow her to ride the horse when he races. John Ortiz plays another trainer named Turo Escalante. He appears to be somewhat of a shady character, and you get the impression that he knows people who can do bad things for him if required. Ortiz plays Escalante with a very thick accent, so much so that it can be hard to understand what he is saying. Escalante is loosely based on Julio Canani, a Peruvian horse trainer who has had great success in America.
The pilot episode of Luck is a fairly complicated place to being a show. There’s a lot going on, on and off the track, and a lot of characters to introduce. It looks like it will be a complicated show that will have multiple storylines running in each episode. The pilot is stylishly directed of course, with Mann at the helm, and with Hoffman and Nolte in key roles, the acting pedigree is certainly there. We’ll learn more as the series develops, but Luck is off to an interesting start.
David Dougan
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