I have this weird sort of fascination with the Sprouse twins. Mostly because I can never remember which is which and they seem to pick strange roles to play. I kinda remember thinking I wanted to watch Beautiful Disaster when it came out but then I immediately forgot about it. Thankfully, streaming exists.
Abby (Virginia Gardner) was raised to be an amazing poker player. She runs away from Las Vegas and her father to go to college, moving in with her friend, America (Libe Barer). The first night Abby is there, Mer takes her to a secret underground fight club where Abby meets Travis (Dylan Sprouse), one of the fighters. They have an instant connection but Abby is adamant about not getting into a relationship with him. However, the two make a bet at Travis’ next fight. If he wins, Abby has to live with him for a month. Of course, he wins. Toward the end of the month, Abby gets a desperate call from her father needing her to come back to Las Vegas to win $100,000 to get him out of trouble. She leaves without saying anything to anyone. Travis finds out and follows her to Vegas, where he agrees to another fight in order to win the money.
If you couldn’t tell by this description, Beautiful Disaster is all over the place. The will-they-won’t-they in the beginning was actually kinda interesting. It was a little annoying that Travis was so perfect. We never see him lose a fight; with the exception of one time, we never see him do anything terribly bad (I’m not counting amateur underground fighting as bad); and he is frequently an attentive and ideal boyfriend. The movie wants us to think he’s a “bad boy” because he fights but he is completely the opposite.
And that is where the majority of the movie lies. With their budding relationship. The whole ‘Abby saves her father’ plot takes up about a half hour, maybe 45 minutes, of the movie. It was almost like an afterthought. “Oh right, Abby is supposed to be this badass poker player. We should have her play poker more.” But then we don’t actually see her play poker. We see her distract the other players and pretend to be dumb at the game. Neither of those skills makes her an elite poker player. I wish they just spent the rest of the movie on their relationship and left this part out. Especially since there is a sequel that came out a few weeks ago. They could have put all of the poker stuff in there. It probably would have made this movie better.
Rating: B-