Luck (2022)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Luck brings a lot of energy to a movie that is pleasant enough for anyone to spend time with.
Harmless, Luck is a movie that can play in the background and/or occupy younger viewers and serve as that de facto babysitter movie people sometimes need to count on.
Eva Noblezada gives a great performance, full of energy and optimism.
NO
Structurally, the movie is a bit of a mess. Once we understand that a “Land of Luck” exists and that’s where much of the story will occur, the movie continues to reinvent the rules and change things to the point of exhaustion.
After years of languishing and a bit of controversy and turmoil tossed in, this feels like a snakebitten project that never really had a chance.
Commits the cardinal sin of not really understanding the differences between luck, coincidence, and cause-and-effect.
OUR REVIEW
There is a spunky spirit and vibe contained within Luck, an Apple TV+ acquisition from Skydance Animation, the upstart animation studio led by former Pixar co-founder John Lasseter. Lasseter built his brand on limitless creativity, the challenging of thinking, and creating worlds and characters audiences had never seen in animation before. Pixar made its mark creating films that transcended any target audience or specific demographic - they spoke to everyone uniquely and memorably.
Lasseter’s exit from Pixar and Disney, and the reasons why he is no longer associated with those studios, have been well-documented. Even still, it seems slightly puzzling that he would be connected to a film that arrives with such little fanfare or attention. Luck isn’t buried, per se, but it’s not like Apple TV+ opened the checkbook for a substantial investment in letting people know: a) this film exists; and b) the film marks the major return to filmmaking for the once-former titan of the animation world.
About 15-20 minutes into Luck, you can see why the movie simply doesn’t work. That spunky spirit and vibe largely comes from the eager, enthusiastic Eva Noblezada, providing the voice for Sam, our main character. Orphaned, Sam is turning 18 and has never been able to connect with a foster family. Aging out of the system, the orphanage has set up a small apartment for her to set out and make it on her own.
The catch here is that Sam is deemed the “unluckiest girl in the world.” However, while some of her foibles and stumbles can be chalked up to being unlucky, others appear to be simply coincidental. And please tell me we are not associating the fact that dozens of families have denied Sam the opportunity to find her “forever family” as being unlucky. That just feels very wrong. On a lot of levels.
Nonetheless, Sam lands a job and tries to make a go of it. Life is hard; or as Luck would have us believe, just hard enough to sit on a sidewalk, outside a café, offering bites of panini to a black cat wandering nearby. That black cat leaves behind a penny, which, pardon the pun, instantly changes Sam’s fortunes. With everything going well for once, she decides to give the magical penny to Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), a young girl who Sam has bonded with at the orphanage and is ready to be adopted.
However, the penny gets lost, the cat (voiced by Simon Pegg) starts talking and soon Sam is whisked away into an otherworldly adventure where she will learn the true meaning of luck and how it parlays into human existence.
I mean, sure.
Luck has ideas, and a spirited cast ready to make this the best it can be. However, the story fails to make much sense, evidenced by the fact that with seven credited writers on the film, we are still inventing rules and building worlds over an hour into this 105-minute film. Trying to understand Luck, and the Wonka-esque, dimestore Pixar universe it inhabits is hard enough. Now imagine they keep changing the rules and adding more details every time you think you might have a handle on what Sam’s journey is supposed to be.
As it turns out, Luck was unlucky and doomed from the start. When Lasseter joined the project, Emma Thompson quit immediately. The film was originally in the control of Paramount Pictures, but Lasseter’s hiring with Skydance Animation caused Paramount’s animation wing to end their relationship with Skydance. Enter Apple TV+, who, in 2021, swooped in and bought the distribution rights to the film and the rest is history.
We could go into the changing of directors, the multiple rewrites and the years this thing languished. In the end, Luck feels cobbled together and unwieldy. The animation, quite frankly, looks like something you would expect to find in a streaming or made-for-TV animated film, hardly the crisp, photorealistic worlds Lasseter’s previous companies helped pioneer. There’s lots of colors, lots of stuff happening, but it’s all smokescreen for a story that falls apart the moment Sam enters a hidden world consisting of friendly monsters, a leprechaun army who “engineers” good luck, an upside-down bad luck world, a bizarre, flamboyant unicorn (Flula Borg, appearing in a completely different movie from everyone else it seems), and a dragon, voiced by Jane Fonda, who somehow lords over the oh-so cleverly named “Land of Luck.”
Noblezada is charming, her performance full of energy and enthusiasm. However, Luck remains a struggle to get through. I ran out of red string and wall space in trying to understand the details. And when you think of all the strain and struggle that went into getting this film completed and up on screen, you have to wonder what Apple TV+ execs thought when they saw the final product. Perhaps, that’s why Lasseter’s name is quietly attached and there simply were not a whole lot of lucky pennies available to make this thing a success.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Colin O’Donoghue, Lil Rel Howery, Flula Borg, John Ratzenberger, Adelynn Spoon, Grey DeLisle
Director: Peggy Holmes
Written by: Kiel Murray (screenplay); Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger, Kiel Murray (story); Julie Miranda (additional dialogue)
Based on the concept by Rebecca Carasco, Juan De Dios, Julian Muñoz Romero
Release Date: August 5, 2022
Apple TV+