Starring William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin.

Rated 18A.

Opens Friday, January 16, at the Granville 7

Two guys walk into a Las Vegas casino. One is hot to trot and ready to roll. The other, however, looks a lot like William H. Macy, the perennial hangdog loser from Fargo--you know, the one whose face brings to mind that crumpled sock lost behind the chesterfield. The first fellow rolls a seven, then an 11, and the Macy guy, here called Bernie Lootz, strolls by and, crapola, it's snake eyes for the rest of the night.

Bernie's a "cooler", someone whose special talent is sucking all the joy, not to mention luck, right out of the room. And that's all he does, in life and in his duties for Shelly Kaplow, the manager of the Shangri-La, an old-school joint where the cats still dress like Sinatra and break your kneecaps if you step out of line. Bernie walks with a limp, as a matter of fact, the result of some financial mishap that has left him in debt to his boss, who also happens to be the closest thing he's got to a best friend.

Now, however, Bernie's slate is almost clean, and he wants to start over somewhere else, despite the fact that he has screwed up marriage and family life and everything else he has ever tried. Then the shmuck happens to bump into an adorable but down-on-her-luck cocktail waitress called Natalie (Maria Bello), and--what are the odds?--she seems to like him.

Actually, we suspect Natalie's motives from the start, and so does Bernie, but when it finally dawns on him that she might actually sleep with him without money changing hands, the smile that slowly creeps across his face--well, it's enough to turn that ratty old sock into the finest argyle around. Next thing you know, thanks to some of the most genuine, and genuinely appealing, sex scenes ever committed to camera, he's smiling a lot. But that turns out to be bad for business. Slot machines suddenly go bling-bling when Bernie walks by. Even so, Shelly doesn't want him to go, and he'll go to elaborate means not to lose his investment.

The film, written by first-time director Wayne Kramer with Frank Hannah, has a running subplot about new-style gangsters wanting in on the Disneyfication of Vegas, much to Shelly's disgust. These sections swing between the preposterous and the simply unengaging. And the troublesome arrival of Bernie's son and his pregnant-junkie wife (Shawn Hatosy and blow-up doll Estella Warren) reeks more of narrative desperation than of organic development.

Kramer's main interest, though, is in his central trio. And as long as they're around, The Cooler crackles with a kind of David Mamet just-for-fun energy that's well worth betting a ticket on.