I mentioned before that a lot of streaming services all seemed to have big drops on August 5th, and Apple TV+’s was the animated feature Luck. The advertising for the movie that I came across made sure to note it came from the man behind movies like Toy Story 2 and Cars. Well, I really like one of those. Granted, the man in question is John Lasseter, and he left Pixar under, let’s say, less than ideal circumstances, so that may be why he wasn’t actually mentioned in the advertising. That said, the look of the movie had a very Pixar-ish look, and even if I am not all that familiar with Skydance Animation, maybe they might be worth a look.
I mean, I have probably wasted my time with worse than this if it turns out to be bad.
Well, the good news is the movie isn’t bad. It is, however, resoundingly mediocre. The movie opens with Sam (voice of Eva Noblezada), a phenomenally unlucky young woman. She’s just turned 18, and that means she has to move out of the foster home she’s been living in for most of her life. She’s anxious, not comfortable yet having her own apartment and a job, but that comes down to both her exceptional bad luck and how much she wants to be there for her much-younger friend Hazel (Adelynn Spoon). Sure, it seems odd that an 18 year old girl would consider a girl of maybe ten her best friend, but the movie doesn’t concern itself too much with that. Instead, Sam is worried Hazel will be passed over by potential adoptive parents. She wants to send Hazel a little good luck that she doesn’t have herself when a chance encounter with a black cat leaves Sam with an honest-to-goodness lucky penny. Unfortunately, she loses the penny due to her own bad luck before she can pass it to Hazel, but maybe she can get another?
Small problem there: the black cat, named Bob (Simon Pegg), not only speaks in a Scottish accent, but he doesn’t really want to help in part because he can’t. Sam manages to chase Bob down to the land of Luck where all good luck is literally made, a land inhabited by all kinds of beings associated with good luck, such as leprechauns, rabbits, cats, and at the center of it all, a dragon named Babe (Jane Fonda) can sniff out bad luck like nothing else. Humans aren’t allowed here, and Bob is on thin ice with his leprechaun supervisor The Captain (Whoopi Goldberg basically phoning it in), so if either of them gets in trouble, they could find themselves in Bad Luck with its denizens, a lot of goblins and the like. Can Sam get some luck for Hazel and get out before she and Bob get into a lot of trouble?
If there was a single word to describe this movie, I’d go with “saccharine.” “Harmless” might be another one. There are some nice animation moments, particularly the slapstick comedy that is Sam trying to do anything. But overall, there’s a lot of talk about luck and the characters all feel rather superficial. It’s really hard to get worked up over something that might have been a plotline in a Care Bears TV show.
If anything, it looks like the movie is trying its best to copy Pixar in many ways. The characters all have a general Pixar-ish look. Sure, the cast is full of celebrities doing voices, but no really huge names, going instead for actors that can do a certain type of character and not just some famous face doing some work on the side. There’s a twist in the end involving the land of Bad Luck, and yeah, there’s even a character voiced by John Ratzenberger, but Luck lacks the heart of the better Pixar movies. It may be going for an Inside Out or a Soul vibe with the magical land stuff, but instead, it feels more like a Cars, a story that will probably entertain the little ones, but not much else.
Grade: C
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