The Lucky Ones Movie Review

The Lucky Ones is a story about soldiers on leave on a road trip in the US. The Lucky Ones has interesting moments but rests gently on the cloud of safety.

Home on leave Colee (Rachael McAdams), Cheever (Tim Robbins) and TK (Michael Peña) meet on the plane back to the states. When they arrive, they find themselves in the middle of a blackout that has screwed up the plane schedule. Unwilling to wait, they hop in a car and start driving. Cheever, the oldest soldier who is actually out of the service now, cannot wait to get home to his long-time wife and teenage son. Colee is on her way to Las Vegas to preserve the memory of her friend. TK is also on his way to Las Vegas with a secret.

The Lucky Ones is highly dialogue driven because most of the story takes place in a small area. Writer- Director Niel Burger and writer Dirk Wittenborn are obviously trying to make a movie with deep meaning, with a strong resonating point. Burger and Wittenborn obviously want the audience to leave feeling something. The Lucky Ones has emotional, natural and situational disasters splattered like black in a Jackson Pollock painting, with the same attention to careful assembly or sense. Burger and Wittenborn flail about wildly trying to create the perfect situation that will leave the audience in tears, in shock or with belly aches from laughter. Occasionally an emotional moment will sting the audience but only because we feel almost nothing through the rest of the movie. By the end of The Lucky Ones, the audience wants so desperately to feel anything, to be offered anything by the script, but no satisfaction is given.

The acting doesn't match the writing in The Lucky Ones. Watching Rachael McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Peña try to make the script believable is perplexing. McAdams, Robbins and Peña do their best to lend some credence to a script full of shallow platitudes. How good can any actor act when the script could have easily been written as a practice script by a teenager for his drama class?

The visuals don't offer any redemption. Most of The Lucky Ones takes place inside a minivan. There are escapades outside the van (which make no sense) but the nondescript van interior is the primary visual. It would be the appropriate visual if the dialogue was more compelling, but the van makes an already frozen script icier.

I left The Lucky Ones trying to figure out why Niel Burger and Dirk Wittenborn had made this movie and wondering what was their point. I chewed it over for several days and I still cannot figure out the point of The Lucky Ones.