YOUR LUCKY DAY - Mark Reviews Movies

Your Lucky Day, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 9, 2023

It might not be the best move to have characters repeatedly explain how and why the plot of a thriller shouldn't and probably won't work. It happens with some frequency in Your Lucky Day, writer/director Daniel Brown's increasingly convoluted and confusing thriller about a bunch of people conniving and killing over a winning lottery ticket.

Little about it is convincing even from the start, and that includes the grandly loaded preface that the movie is "based on the American Dream." Some ambitions for greater importance are best left unstated, and that's especially the case here.

The plot initially revolves around Sterling (the late Angus Cloud), a low-rent drug dealer who is ambushed, beaten, and robbed by a couple of preppy young men. Upon regaining consciousness, he stumbles into a local convenience store to help make up a small slice of the population in it.

There's the owner/cashier of the shop, a man named Amir (Mousa Hussein Kraish) who has a wife and young daughter. There are also Abraham (Elliot Knight) and Ana Marlene (Jessica Garza), who are shopping for ice cream because she's pregnant. Heading straight to the back before Sterling's arrival is a beat cop named Cody (Sterling Beaumon), who must be up to something particularly noisy in the bathroom for as much as he doesn't hear until the plot absolutely requires that he does notice something loud happening in the front of the store.

The loud something is a well-to-do man (played by Spencer Garrett), who introduces himself by being overtly racist toward Amir, realizing that he has won a lotto jackpot worth more than $150 million. Sterling pulls a pistol on him (It's a very good thing for the plot that those thieves took everything but that from him). In the trying to stop the robbery, the cop accidentally shoots the lottery winner in the head, before Sterling shoots him multiple times.

Forget all of that for a moment. Why does this man turn up at this particular shop at this time of the night in a neighborhood he clearly would rather avoid, check all of his tickets at the scanner, and make such a loud and public show of his improbable luck? Whatever the odds of winning such a lottery jackpot may be, increase those exponentially for all of this, especially the thoroughly unlikely elements of it, to happen in addition to that win.

Also add into the equation that, for some reason, everyone in the neighborhood and beyond in the city who could be in the vicinity of the shop just happens to show up at exactly the same moment. Only two other people, without a motive having to do with the ticket, end up here over the course of the story. Look, it's late and near the holidays and all of that, but a single prospective customer could put a quick end to or a real complication into the surviving group's plan. It's almost too convenient that it never becomes an issue.

Anyway, the plan is to make the violent deaths of the winner and the cop look like a pair of murders, by putting them in different parts of the city, and to split the lottery money. It's strange how many questions the characters themselves have about how such a scheme could possibly work, only for their ultimate solution to the problem to be as befuddling and full of holes as it is.

Plus, it quickly becomes apparent that there's little reason to care or worry about the fates of these characters, regardless of how manipulative Brown is in giving them various familial connections and class-based concerns. At worst, we have Sterling, who's definitely responsible for the bloodshed that starts all of this in motion, and at best, we have people willing to become accomplices to murder after the fact—and don't seem too intelligent about pulling off this plan, either.

Would people be willing to do something like this? They would, of course, but since these characters are little more than sad back stories serving as gears in the wobbly machine of a plot, the movie definitely doesn't give us much, if anything, to digest in terms of some moral debate or social understanding for why these particular characters actually do such a thing.

A later development in Your Lucky Day, which gives the group an external threat to deal with, throws all of that out the window, anyway. At that point, it becomes clear that Brown doesn't know what to do with this plot, except to keep laying on the complications, contrivances, and conveniences nothing else matters beyond the mess he has unconvincingly orchestrated.

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