In the classic 1992 comedy, Honeymoon in Vegas, a poker room cheat sets the plot into motion. Nicholas Cage plays Jack Singer, who has recently proposed to his girlfriend Betsy, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. There is somewhat of a curse already on their wedding plans since Jack swore to his mother on his deathbed that he would never get married. Regardless, his girlfriend Betsy has future plans for marriage and babies, so she talks Jack into ignoring his promise to his mother. They head down to Las Vegas for a quick wedding and check into Bally’s Casino Resort, where most of the movie was actually filmed on location. And this is when the drama begins.
Before the wedding, a wealthy professional gambler named Tommy Korman, played by James Caan, sees Betsy and notices her striking resemblance to his beloved late wife. He arranges a crooked poker game at the casino and invites Jack to play. Jack goes into the game with $500 and goes on to lose $65,000 as his straight flush to the Jack is beat by Tommy’s higher straight flush to the Queen. Tommy offers to erase the debt if he can spend the weekend with Jack’s fiancée.
Cage doesn’t catch on to the cheating, which takes us through his crazy antics from Las Vegas to Hawaii and back to Las Vegas again while he tries to win his girl back from the dishonest professional gambler.
While the film doesn’t exactly centre around the game of poker, it does show how one poker room cheat can propel the course of action for a wild weekend in Las Vegas. There are great shots in and around the casinos, which makes the viewer really want to travel down to Las Vegas and check them out. It also teaches a valuable lesson about the highs and lows of gambling, which seems to appear in many films that are set in Las Vegas. The whole film takes shape because of the sneaky actions of a poker room cheat, and it proves to be an entertaining couple of hours for any poker fan.
