Mark Reviews Movies: LUCK (2022)

Luck, Apple Original Films/Skydance Animation

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

Luck presents a world of so much imaginative potential and possibility, and then, it has its main characters search for and collect a bunch of stuff. That's at least an excuse, albeit a poor one, to see more of the fantastical place at the center of this computer-animated movie. As the movie's routine plot unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the filmmakers haven't considered much about the concept, rules, or even the sights of their world.

That place is the Land of Luck, and it's divided in two between Good Luck, which is interchangeably the name of about half of the realm and the concept itself, and Bad Luck, which is interchangeably the same thing for that term. Yes, not much thought has been put into this.

The same can be said of the narrative, which revolves around Sam (voice of Eva Noblezada), who was either orphaned or abandoned at some point as a child. There's a distinct lack of specificity from the start that carries through the rest of Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger's screenplay, and it's clear that director Peggy Holmes' movie just wants to get to the gimmick and the locale the filmmakers have devised as quickly as possible.

Sam has recently turned 18, which means she has aged out of the group home where she has lived for most or a good portion of her life. A social worker has set her up with an apartment and a job, and there's something sort of refreshing but also underwhelming about the blank slate of a character that Sam is. She doesn't have any big aspirations or goals. Her only dream has been to have a family, but now, the most she can hope for is an ordinary life. That's the somewhat refreshing part, but since the screenplay lacks those specifics, Sam just feels aimless and passive as a protagonist.

Her defining trait is that she's unlucky—clumsy, yes, but also just hounded by unfortunate events and coincidences. When she wakes up on the morning of her first day at the new job, for example, she has to rush to get ready, but an open window and someone using a leaf blower just outside distract her, a broom blocks the door to the bathroom, and, after a lot of struggling with the toaster, the toast itself is launched against the wall, before landing jam-side-down on the floor. If there's an apparent strength to the movie, it's in the way the screenwriters imagine and Holmes stages the physical comedy of Sam's constant misfortune. A couple sequences of common or more elaborate bad luck here are simple but creative uses of pratfalls, comedic timing, and not-so-happy accidents.

Take the chase that eventually leads Sam to the Land of Luck. She meets a black cat on the street after her first day of work, and later, it turns out the cat is named Bob. He can talk, by the way, and is voiced by Simon Pegg, doing a thick Scottish brogue. Bob comes from the Land of Luck, and he has brought a lucky penny into the human realm. Sam finds it, hopes to give it to a fellow orphaned/abandoned kid who needs to some luck on a visit to a new potential family, and loses it in the toilet in one of those solid gag sequences.

When Sam discovers that the cat could her way to find another lucky penny, she chases the feline as it maneuvers through streets, atop umbrellas, and on the back of a bus with the effortlessness of dumb luck. Anyway, Sam finds the cat going through a portal to the Land of Luck and follows it. The two have to navigate the world, its various quirks, and its rather dull bureaucracy to find a new penny for Sam to give to the girl and for Bob to keep himself from being punished.

There's a lot more to find and gather—such as magical rocks and lucky dust and secret doors—in order to get to a penny, though, and that's how the story also becomes a tour of the Land of Luck. It's populated by leprechauns, talking animals of both the everyday—pigs and more cats—and fantastical—unicorns and dragons—varieties, goblins, and anthropomorphized roots. The world itself is clean and shiny, with elaborate clockwork mechanisms transporting the inhabitants across distances and spinning stools keeping the leprechaun workers moving in the pattern of a Celtic knot.

Such initial details are clever and amusing. As more and more spaces emerge, though, the design loses its luster, both from the uncertain way the place operates and how creative potential becomes bogged down by the introduction of fairly routine systems (Good Luck, the place, has a CEO, voiced by Jane Fonda, and Bad Luck, the concept, has to be unclogged by a kind of unicorn plumber, voiced by Flula Borg).

The plot, with its constant fetching, and characters, with their bland personalities overshadowed by said fetching, don't help, either. Luck possesses some early inspirations of design and some inventive comedic flourishes, but its reliance on formula prevents the movie from developing its world and characters.

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