Lucky

6

On the surface Lucky felt like a winner. A crime thriller starring an interesting and popular actress, with a decent cadre of well-known secondary and tertiary character actors and lots of lush action shots and plenty of lens flares. The Apple TV+ formula, if we’re being straight about it. The thing is, a formula is just a formula, and without a good plan, a good script and a strong vision of what you’re making beyond the superficial concept, you’re going to fail. Think of it as Steve’s plan for mass transportation for Seattle in Singles: “You give them great coffee, great music… they will park and ride. I know they will.” This, Steve, is a concept of a plan that doesn’t take into consideration that people love their cars. And perhaps coffee and music (which to this day confuses me where and how music will come into play) isn’t enough of a draw to get them to give up the thing they love most. Namely alone time, privacy and personal property. My point is, Lucky is like Steve’s two-point coffee and music pitch: they put a couple things into play and hope the actual work of the thing just kind of falls into place based on flawed, wishful thinking.

It’s clear the big selling point here is Anya Taylor-Joy. There’s a reason her alien-like visage takes up the entire poster, and the trailer features her running, jumping and bleeding. I get it, she has an other-wordly quality about her that’s tough to look away from. She’s going to be in the new Dune movie and just played the younger version of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in a Mad Max film. I didn’t read the novel on which this show is based, but presume that they knew ahead of time that her character would be front and center while the camera constantly framed squarely on her battered face. Again, a logical and smart choice. I suppose that’s the “good coffee” part of the pitch. Because, hey, who doesn’t love good coffee on their morning commute? And where in the 1990s had better coffee than Seattle? Solid idea. The issue here is, like Steve’s pitch, the “music” part never connects or makes sense. Are you going to pipe music into the train cars? And is it all going to be Soundgarden? Not everyone loves Soundgarden. People listen to whatever music they want in headphones. Even in the 90s. Anyway, enough with the Singles references, but suffice it to say that beyond the casting, this show seemed to have absolutely no idea what it was going to be.

I watched this entire series and I’m still a bit confused what the actual crime was. Which is a problem when you’re watching a crime thriller. It does that whole beginning with a short action scene where things have clearly gone sideways and then flashes back to… three weeks earlier. But it’s like a kinda-sorta flashback that only goes back a little bit, only to repeat this initial scene again in full and go beyond it considerably. In other words, it’s completely unnecessary. Clearly something that got noted in the edit. But I understand why. Because the show’s pacing is absolutely glacial. Not verging on boring. Just plain boring. And without this little glimpse — or promise — that something will eventually happen, they might lose viewers from the jump as we watch dark scenes of exposition dumps and “sexy” shots of two attractive actors plotting and planning in hotel rooms. From minute one there is just something off with the tone, cadence and plotting of the show. It’s hard to put into words, but I believe I turned to Ms. Hipster early in the runtime and asked, “What exactly are we watching here?” We thought about bailing several minutes in, but we wanted to see how they would convince people to leave their cars and take a train instead.

It turns out one of their big swings is to pretend that Timothy Olyphant is going to be a big part of this series. Playing Lucky’s (Taylor-Joy) incarcerated father, I get the sense they had a couple days with him, so the vast majority of his scenes are just him talking to Lucky on a phone from prison. I’m not the world’s biggest Olyphant fan or anything, but I know he’s a huge draw for quite a few folks. So, if you’re banking on him being in your life for seven hours here, you may want to lower your expectations. He does eventually make it out of that prison phone booth, but the scripting doesn’t exactly give him anything juicy or myth-making to chew on. Focusing on this for a second, the relationship between Lucky and her father makes about zero sense. He seemingly raised her as part of his grifting, using her as a prop to dupe marks. Because I guess people trust dudes with kids more than dudes solo. In these phone calls to Lucky, he reminds her of the lessons he taught her as a grifting child in order to get her out of her current situation. Her current situation being on the run after stealing a bag of cash from a bad guy, but also running from the F.B.I., who are also looking for said bag of cash? Like I said, it’s never very clear exactly what the crime is here, and mostly why the feds want this money. Anyhow, I think the clumsy dialog and stylistic choices — mostly the look and feel of things over actual human moments — kept me from ever feeling the bond between Olyphant and Taylor-Joy. It’s just real clunky.

Speaking of clunky, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s F.B.I. character is absolutely horrendous. I’ve seen her in a couple things previously and recall her being decent, but she’s just miscast here. Or mis-scripted. She acts not at all like an agent, and her constant dialed-to-eleven scowling and assholery feel both unrealistic and poorly delivered. Ms. Hipster and I winced every time she was on screen. And as one of Lucky’s main antagonists (until she’s not), she’s on screen a lot. It’s a poorly concepted and constructed character all around, and the actress may have done the best she could with it, but it ultimately operated as a virus that infected the overall success of a pretty unsuccessful project. Also, Annette Bening. She is Lucky’s other antagonist. Technically her mother-in-law, she is a criminal who works for a bigger criminal (William Fichtner) who worked with her father in the past and whose son is married to Lucky. Got that? But, yeah. Bening, in my recollection, was a decent actress at some point in her career. The Grifters and, sigh, American Beauty. But perhaps I’m mistaken and she always had this weird, deep-voiced, monotone delivery that sounds as if she’s reading rather than acting. Whatever it is, it’s distracting and not particularly affecting. I just don’t buy it.

But the show’s biggest problem — aside from several scenes that seem to exist solely to sell the new Ford Bronco — is the scripting. The main conceit is confusing. The relationships between characters is never really resolved. And there is just scene after scene of nothing. Monologues and dialogues that spin and spin for ten minutes at a time where nothing is said and come to nothing. Which I suppose is the fallout of trying to fill seven episodes of television based on a shaky base. You can almost see the director standing off stage giving them the “stretch” signal. “I’m a bad person? I’m a bad person? Well, maybe you’re the bad person.” “You say I’m a bad person, but you do bad things. We all do bad things. Maybe we’re all bad people. But we all have excuses.” “Well, your excuses for being a bad person aren’t as bad as my excuses for being a bad person. That’s why we’re all bad. But we are all people. And we are flawed…” This isn’t a real dialogue from the show, but it might as well be. There’s a scene between Lucky and her estranged husband (Drew Starkey) later in the series in a beautiful beach house that goes on like this for fifteen minutes. Just spinning and spinning the same lines of rearranged dialogue over and over again. It’s mind-numbing. There’s a scene where Lucky ends up in a house out in the desert where she settles for a while where we watch her eat some nice lady’s food and talk to her daughter and generally pull a Walking Dead-on-the-farm for a wheel-spinning episode. This is when they’re not constantly doing the trope of locking people in car trunks without bothering to make sure they don’t have anything in their pockets (looking at you Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed) and the oddball thing where they’re told to bring someone in alive, but choose to fire guns directly at them anyway, somehow assuming their gun won’t actually kill the person they’re aiming directly at? Can we address the car trunk thing for a sec? It is not possible to lock a person in the trunk of a modern vehicle. There are safety mechanisms built into them that don’t allow for that. And I doubt bad guys have messed with the system beforehand for all their trunk-locking shenanigans. We just ignore it, and that annoys me. I’ll give Lucky this, at least they know / admit that a lot of modern cars have a backseat pass-through from the trunk, which gives our hero a different way to escape her predicament. Although, like a lot of instances of the locked-in-the-trunk trope, the bad guys didn’t bother to remove an item from her person (which isn’t hidden or anything) that could definitely be used by the person in the trunk to kill or maim them. It’s all dumb.

I think there was a time in the prestige era of television where we were fine with good-looking, humorless programming that gave the air of being high-minded, or in some way reminded us of indie filmmaking or otherwise had some intangible cache. It didn’t always matter that it made sense. Or had relatable characters. Or a realistic tone, where life isn’t always a brooding, emo high-wire act. As long as there were actors we liked delivering lines and rich scenery or sets to look at. Think of the first season of The Leftovers. Rich and self-serious. But, as we eased into a new era of television, the smart folks came to the realization that nobody really loves the slog. Things can’t always be black-black-black. It’s okay to laugh in the midst of tragedy. It’s okay to talk about other things than what is right in front of you. Think of the same Leftovers series as it entered its amazing second season. It adapted. Television — at least good television — has adapted. But then we get shows like Lucky, which anachronistically can’t find that balance. They live in the prestige world, with all of its elements, but have not learned the lessons of what makes for enjoyable and lasting efforts. I’m not saying this show needed comedy or lightness, but we shouldn’t have to watch a show that constantly reminds us how heavy these fakes lives can be.