Review: ‘Luck’
While Luck has a wonderful start which promises to deliver a very beautiful story, it fails to grasp its own emotional core, leading to a film that has occasional sparks of fun but ultimately falls into a generic trope. A critical loss of momentum is this journey’s biggest flaw.
Skydance Animation’s first movie tells the story of Sam (Eva Noblezada), a girl who had to leave the foster home she lived in because she turned eighteen. She has the misfortune of being extremely unlucky, in the sense that she is comically clumsy and things never seem to go her way.
Sam wants to help Hazel (Adelyn Spoon), a fellow foster kid, so she can finally be adopted by a couple. She believes she can achieve this by giving Hazel a lucky penny, devices which prove to be real after Sam gets one from Bob (Simon Pegg), a talking cat who appears to bring good luck.
This introduction to the foster home environment Sam grows up in, along with the presentation of her constant bad luck make for a very interesting premise. Her selfless desire to help the young Hazel is a very compelling narrative that presents very tough challenges of its own.
Sadly, the film drives away from this relationship and storyline the minute Sam enters the Luck world, a dimension where both good luck and bad luck are created, while also serving as Bob’s home. The duo become so entangled in their mission to help Hazel, that Hazel herself and Sam’s feelings take a back seat for most of the runtime.
If only the movie had remained focused on the sweet friendship between the two girls, while the talking cat and the alternate dimension full of leprechauns as a happy bonus, Luck might have been a much more delightful adventure. In this case, less would’ve been more.
This statement can also be applied to the very complicated world-building the film attempts to establish during a very short amount of time. A whole industry dedicated to the mass production of luck might be an appealing concept, but perhaps it shouldn’t take around half an hour to explore it.
Luck’s exhausting rambling around while trying to convince you this huge, over-complicated world is something to be wondered by, instead of mildly intrigued by, is precisely what drives away from the sweet story the movie attempted to tell from the start.
On the positive side, the protagonist is completely likable. Sam’s constant struggles which come with her bad luck while trying to help her friends is charming. You don’t root for her because she is the main character, you root for her because her positive attitude when confronted by trouble makes her a compelling character.
When it comes to her loyal friend Bob, the talking cat, there is a worthy sidekick to be found. The voice acting from Simon Pegg gives the impression that he had a lot of fun while working on this story. His deadpan humor and aloof personality do not become increasingly annoying and his chemistry with Eva Noblezada’s Sam is great.
It is easy, with very smug characters who don’t appear to sympathize with the protagonist at first, to quickly disregard them as selfish. But Bob has a surprisingly good characterization which shows that, even though he is aloof and self-focused, he is not a bad cat at all.
The banter and emotional depth these characters display with each other is the best thing to come out of this adventure. They make the long, redundant sequences related to delivering exposition worth sitting through. They drive a narrative that runs out of gas rather quickly.
Overall, there are some things to enjoy in Luck. A dragon who works as a CEO (and dresses accordingly) voiced by Jane Fonda was a delight to watch. And between the very cluttered Luck world, there are some sequences with beautiful lightning and just a smidge of amusement.
But the aforementioned distractions turn this fairy tale into an experience that overstays its welcome. There is no doubt that Skydance Animation has plenty of room to improve. This wasn’t a terrible start, by no means. It was just unfortunate that the film turned out to be incredibly rough around the edges.
They seem to have a plan, with several more animated features on the way. But when it comes to their debut adventure with a young girl, a talking cat, and an office dragon, Skydance Animation has run out of luck.
Rating: 2/5
Luck is now available on Apple TV+.
