Luck - Movie Review

Critics Score - 5 of 10

General Audience Score - 5 of 10

Kids Score - 6 of 10

In it’s efforts to reel in subscribers, Apple+ has been getting some pretty great TV shows with some impressive quality in the last year or so. On the movie front, they still have only a handful of original films, some better than others, but they did get Coda, the Best Picture winner from last year to add some clout to their lineup. They now are getting their first digitally animated film, after the wonderfully hand drawn animated Wolfwalkers from a couple years ago, Luck debuts as their first fully CG film. Unfortunately the movie fails to impress on both the animated front as well as much of the story and screenwriting elements. The Skydance Animation studio behind the film clearly had aspirations of an Inside Out part two, but to compare Luck to Inside Out would be an atrocity. While the film struggled just to be average in most every way, to compare it to Pixar’s Lightyear from a couple months ago, I found Luck was actually a little bit more entertaining and enjoyable. But not by much. So save your time, go watch The Sea Beast on Netflix or Turning Red on Disney+ if your looking for a great animated film, cause if you bet too much on Luck, you’ll most likely lose it all.

SYNOPSIS - We’re introduced to our almost eighteen year old protagonist Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) as she’s dancing and trying to record a homemade music video, lip-syncing Madonna’s Lucky Star. But as the camera moves further back and her young friend Hazel jumps in to dance the chorus with her, all of a sudden the hanging stars start falling on top of Sam and the green background collapses. This prompts Hazel to comment, “You sure have bad luck, Sam Greenfield.” But then as the camera pans up, we see the Home For Girls sign pass by clueing us in that these girls are actually all orphans. Because Sam is coming of age, the next day she’s taken to her new apartment where she’ll begin college classes and start a new job. As we observe Sam going about life now that she’s living on her own, we observe pretty much the unluckiest person ever. Everything this girl does is a disaster. Until one night she bumps into a black cat while sitting on the sidewalk eating a panini. She shares a bite of her sandwich with the feline but after it leaves, she discovers a small gold token that looks like a penny but has a four leaf clover inscribed on it. This is where the screenplay really hits it’s stride, the exploring of luck, the funny shenanigans Sam gets into, it’s really quite amusing to watch some of these scenarios play out. But soon she discovers that this little coin bestows the power of incredibly good luck upon it’s holder.

But after Sam inexplicably loses her lucky token, she meets back up with the black cat Bob (Simon Pegg), and finds out that not only can he speak but also that he is just about the luckiest creature ever. Bob carelessly can step off a balcony and fall onto a passing truck with pine trees that’ll catch it and bend over to deliver it safely on the ground. As I mentioned, these parts of the first act are where the film is at it’s most entertaining, exploring these humorous coincidences were quite amusing and offered some decent laughs. But after Bob mysteriously opens and jumps into a green portal, Sam jumps in after him and they travel to the land of luck. This land is a magical place full of leprechauns, cats, pigs and several other creatures that’s reminiscent of the land of emotions from Inside Out. The land of good luck is where amazing things happen, the visuals are pretty unique and well designed, it reminded me of the originality present in the design of the mechanical world in Robots. But as the film moves into the second act, this is where the humor and the writing begin to deteriorate. Unlike Inside Out but more like this year’s Pixar movie Lightyear, every obstacle they encounter feels forced. At first they need a lucky coin, then a luck crystal, then a bunny shaped drone, they need to get into this place and everything that must happen for them to accomplish their mission feels forced, it doesn’t happen organically in the story. By the time the story winds it’s way back to Sam learning a lesson and trying to find some emotional beats to hit, far too much of it was yawn inducing and unfortunately underwhelming.

For a digitally animated film, I found the computer generated effects to be below par. Most of the detailed rendering of things like hair, eyebrows, to contain little detail, even when they did close up shots of the cat, with things like the whiskers and ears, I found terribly underwhelming. Most high end video games have far better animation than luck did, even though it’s “supposed to look kiddie”, most Pixar films from six or eight years ago surpassed it. I also felt the movements the characters mouths made weren’t enough, they were obviously designed small by intent but when some of the actors with loud voices spoke, especially Whoopi Goldberg, the mouth movements didn’t do the voices justice. Visuals aside, the screenplay was inventive, original with a nice touch of humor during parts of the film, yet with much of the drama feeling contrived we have to feign interest in most everything going on. And with so much of Luck giving off Inside Out vibes, it’s hard to not see where many areas of story had problems. They could’ve easily cut out some sections of the injected drama and plot devices to move things along and not drag the animated film out to it’s hour and forty-five minute runtime. The voice performances were mostly fine, Simon Pegg as Bob the black cat was a treat, but the music and the original score weren’t memorable at all. When Luck is working at it’s best, it’s really quite entertaining, but it doesn’t utilize those elements consistently enough and in the end it just doesn’t have enough Luck to stick the landing.

SUMMARY - While Luck is perfectly tolerable fare for most kids, for adults and movie aficionados, they will be left wanting more. Ultimately this movie feels like an Inside Out wannabe, and while the aspirations, originality and creativity are to be applauded, too many of the film’s other subpar elements leave the audience feeling that their Luck just ran out.