THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA - Mark Reviews Movies

The Luckiest Man in America, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2025

The Luckiest Man in America tells the story of one of the most infamous incidents in TV game show history, but co-writer/director Samir Oliveros seems to believe that makes his movie enough. Everything here exists in the bubble of the moment when a man named Michael Larson was on "Press Your Luck" and kept winning more and more prize money. The crew in the studio and the network executives in the control room had no clue what was happening, how this odd but otherwise anonymous man was winning so often, and what could be done to stop him before people started getting fired.

The big question for the movie, however, is why anyone feels the need to tell this particular and particularly niche story. Oliveros doesn't seem to have an answer.

As such, Larson's story in this form exists as something of a real-time thriller, pitting the contestant against both the show's Big Board, serving as a sort of roulette wheel filled with cash and prizes, and the network bigwigs, who try their best behind the scenes to figure out who this guy is and what pressure they can put on him to force him to stop. The dynamic works fairly well at first, because the depictions of the backstage drama and Larson as a wild card, who knows exactly what he's doing on the show but seems to possess no clue about any other part of his life, are compelling on their face.

It's once the pattern of the plot emerges that we realize Oliveros and co-screenwriter Maggie Briggs don't care to dig any deeper than the surface of this trivial bit of television history. We learn little about the movie's version of Larson, played by Paul Walter Hauser in an effective slow-boil of a performance, and even less in terms of what significance the filmmakers want to convey by way of the guy's record-breaking, controversial appearance on the show.

Michael gets the gig through a bit of deception, pretending to be another applicant for an audition in 1984. That doesn't ring any alarm bells for show co-creator and network executive Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), who finds something strangely charming about this down-on-his-luck guy. After all, it's not anyone who would drive an ice cream truck from Ohio to California, just to have a chance to appear on a game show.

The rest of the movie is set during the shoot, which soon extends beyond the show's 30-minute time constraint, because Michael keeps winning. It's not as if the format of any TV game show is difficult to comprehend, but for those who don't know the program, the filmmakers explain the rules well enough for anyone to understand how a successful contestant could transform the game into an endless affair. Players earn spins by way of answering trivia questions correctly, and every spin offers the chance to either win cash or prizes, lose everything by way of a Whammy, or earn additional spins. Michael seems only capable of the first or third option when the show's second round arrives.

This does, then, play out like a bit of a nightmare for the people who care the most about Michael's participation. For Bill and others upstairs or on the floor, Michael's unstoppable winning streak could mean that the network loses tens of thousands of dollars—or even more—and that some people are going to have to take the blame for it.

For Michael, he knows how his winning is pretty much a guarantee. Every successful spin makes him even more paranoid that someone will find out (He's not cheating, by the way, but like counting cards isn't technically cheating, the method would be frowned upon by those in charge), that he might be denied the money or be kicked out or be arrested, or that, perhaps worst of all, someone might look into the kind of person he actually is, outside of this little scheme. It becomes obvious to him that Bill, on-set producer Chuck (Shamier Anderson), and host Peter Tomarken (Walton Goggins) are working to convince, manipulate, or coerce him into stopping his streak.

Oliveros does create an oppressive atmosphere with the material, since so much of the story is seen from Michael's perspective—those blinding studio lights (maybe shining intentionally brighter and in his eyes to distract him), the disappearance of a telephone that was the only line to the outside world near the set, the presence of extra security and even cops, who don't seem concerned that someone has broken into his ice cream truck. As an actor, Hauser has a particular way of coming across as both inherently off-kilter and sympathetic, and as hints of Michael's broken home life become stronger, some of the tension comes from wondering which quality is more pertinent to understanding this charater.

The filmmakers don't seem to care either way, however, because the story and the potential scandal are more important to them than the man at the center of The Luckiest Man in America. It's so disinterested, in fact, that the movie doesn't even give us a coda explaining what happened in the aftermath of the real Larson's appearance on the show. That shows some confidence in the storytelling, of course, but that's unfortunately misplaced here.

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