The Cooler (2003)

Director: Wayne Kramer
Writer: Wayne Kramer, Frank Hannah
Cast: William H. Macy, Maria Bello, Alec Baldwin, Ron Livingston
Genre: Drama, Romance

The Cooler starts out with some great old fashioned Vegas feel, nicely shown through the main characters The Cooler (Macy), The Waitress (Bello) and The Man (Baldwin). While Baldwin ain't exactly on my favorite list, Bello sure is and I got the utmost respect for Macy. Add the knowledge of Kramer's interesting Running Scared (even if that one actually came out later), and I had expectations for this one.

Making Vegas movies used to be pretty normal back in the days, and not for no reason. The mafia ties, the violence and the dreams and hopes of Vegas. It got it all, but as soon as all those stories are told, it gets increasingly harder to make interesting movies in the same scenery. Kramer succeeds, at least for quite a while. Macy is brilliant as The Cooler, Bello does another great performance molded quite like her role in Payback and even Baldwin manage to bring some depth into the cold hearted Vegas casino boss.


There's several choices you can see coming a mile away in this one, and that's obviously dragging it down, but the atmosphere, the life and especially the characters of Macy and Bello makes this still well worth your time. Add a couple of classic Vegas moments and the nostalgia vs corporation, and you are getting closer to a home run than most movies out of this town ever was.

Kramer has a quite similar look at real people's passion the way I also see it, without taking sexual scenes or nudity into the Hollywood filter, and proves it here as well. The same could later be seen in the before mentioned Running Scared as well, and I salute him for those choices. I'll have to check out Crossing Over (2009) soon, because the combination of this movie and Running Scared makes me real interested in watching more from Kramer. And you'll very soon find Maria Bello in my "There's Something About..."-section. The more I see from her, the less I understand of why we haven't seen a lot more from her throughout the years. That woman got enormous talent, she's not a prude and she manage to give depth to characters in a way more female actresses should learn to do.