Poker In The Media: Honeymoon In Vegas
by Bodog Poker | Aug 24 2010
Honeymoon In Vegas is generally remembered as one of the highlights of early 1990's cinema, featuring a good cast gamely going through the goofy motions. The plot is well-known by now, but let's review it anyway. Jack Singer (Nicolas Cage) swears to his mother on her deathbed that he will never get married. Years later, he's proposed to Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker) and arranged a marriage in beautiful Las Vegas. They check into Bally's hotel and set about having a nice time of it when they run into Tommy Korman. Tommy is immediately smitten by Betsy, who reminds him of his much-beloved late wife.
Here's the thing about Tommy Korman: he's played by James Caan. If you see James Caan in a movie made after, say, 1988, you should immediately assume that he is going to try to screw you over somehow. Korman invites Jack to a poker game, just to see if he can get more time ogling Jack's bride to be, and of course that poker game is crooked because Jack Singer hasn't seen any James Caan films besides The Godfather. Jack manages to lose $85,000 in a few hands and is given a chance to erase that debt using a weekend with his beautiful, blushing soon-to-be-bride as collateral. Jack thinks he stands a chance, which leads to the following exchange, one that sums up many a poker moment for many a player that has experienced a brutally bad beat.
Jack: Do you know what a straight flush is? It's like unbeatable!
Betsy: 'Like' unbeatable is not unbeatable!
Jack: Hey, I know that now, okay?
The plot gets perfectly madcap from there, with Korman agreeing to not have sex with Betsy but needing quality alone time with her. He's off to Hawaii with Sarah Jessica Parker (which is really how Sex and the City should have ended) and Jack is hot on their trail, furious that the man has broken the spirit, if not the exact terms, of their agreement. There's misunderstandings, double-crossings, triple-crossings, Pat Morita, an arrest, and an attempted forced marriage in Vegas, the sort of villainous thing that comes straight out of a Disney fairy tale.
Unlike a Disney fairy tale, however, Nicolas Cage's Jack Singer isn't very dapper or very capable and he finds himself begging and pleading until he can get on a flight back to Vegas and it's in San Jose, California that the film's climactic “let's see if we can expand the cliché any more” moment occurs . That's right, the one scene that everyone who's ever heard of the movie knows: he skydives with a group of Elvis impersonators and ruins the forced wedding, getting back the girl.
Frankly, the movie's poker scenes suffer a bit from making Cage's character a complete idiot. While, yes, the sort of man who'd bet his fiancée away isn't exactly going to give Doyle Brunson or Evelyn Ng a run for their money, the fact that he didn't suspect a man who was so obviously leering at his wife — a filthy rich man, no less — of cheating says an awful lot about how little the writers thought of the game. That said, it's always interesting to see Bally's before its ten different remodelings and there's a few nice nods here and there to Vegas' real culture.
