Four Years On, Luck Still Suffers From a Premise Too Sharp for Its Own Good

“Sam Greenfield is the unluckiest person in the world, and she spends most of Luck trying to prove it.”

That is the setup for a movie that should work. Eva Noblezada plays Sam, an orphaned young woman whose life is defined by bad breaks, from being forced out of her foster home to losing a penny that briefly fixed her fortune. The premise is simple: Sam trades a coin with a talking black cat named Bob (voiced by Simon Pegg), enters the Land of Luck, and must find a replacement penny before Bob gets banished. It sounds like a winning pitch. The execution does not quite land.

Trailer, via Apple TV.

Sam’s Luck Problem

The film opens with Sam sharing food with a black cat, then finding a penny that improves her luck. She loses it by flushing it down a toilet. That’s the engine of the whole story, and it’s also the problem. The penny’s power is never explained beyond its existence. Sam’s bad luck is established through montage, not character, and the film trusts the audience to accept that she is unlucky without showing why.

Bob is a better character. He’s a talking cat who needs the penny for travel, and his desperation sells the stakes. Pegg’s voice work is energetic, and Bob’s exasperation with Sam’s clumsiness drives most of the film’s humor. But Bob is also the reason Sam goes to the Land of Luck, and the film doesn’t spend enough time establishing why she should care about him beyond the deal they’ve struck.

The Land of Luck

The Land of Luck is where the film tries hardest to dazzle. Creatures like leprechauns live there, creating good luck for people on Earth. There’s a Penny depot, a Bad Luck Apparat, and an In-Between space between the Good and Bad Luck lands. Jeff the Unicorn (voiced by Flula Borg) runs the Bad Luck Apparat, which keeps bad luck specks from sticking to the Randomizer, a machine that sends both good and bad luck into Earth.

The world-building is ambitious. The problem is that the film doesn’t commit to it. Characters like Hazel (voiced by Adelynn Spoon), Dragon (Jane Fonda), and Captain (Whoopi Goldberg) are introduced and forgotten within minutes. The film jumps from location to location, from the Penny depot to the In-Between, without taking the time to let the audience settle into any of them.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Simon Pegg delivers the best performance in the film. His Bob is frustrated, desperate, and occasionally charming, and his chemistry with Noblezada carries scenes that otherwise feel thin. Flula Borg as Jeff the Unicorn brings a deadpan energy to the In-Between sequences, and the visual design of the Luck world is imaginative enough to justify repeated viewings.

The film’s biggest weakness is pacing. At 105 minutes, it feels overstuffed. Subplots about Hazel’s adoption hopes and the fate of the Penny depot come and go without resolution. The film promises a story about turning luck around and delivers a series of set pieces instead.

The Verdict

Luck is a film with a great idea and a weak grasp of its own premise. The animation is bright, the voice cast is game, and the world of the Land of Luck has real potential. But the story can’t decide whether it wants to be a character study or a cartoon adventure, and it ends up doing neither well.

This is a movie that knows it’s unlucky, and it doesn’t know what to do about it. The tagline, “Sometimes all you need is for everything to go wrong,” is the closest the film comes to a thesis. It’s also the closest it comes to saying anything meaningful.

The film premiered in Madrid on August 2, 2022, and was released on Apple TV+ and in select theaters in the United States on August 5. It received mixed reviews.

The film is now available to stream.

animation · Apple TV+ · film · Luck · review