Lucky Day is a 2019 crime thriller about a Man who has just been released from prison,trying to hold his family together as his past catches up with him.
Red (Luke Bracey) is at last released from prison, having served two years for cracking safes, now reunited with his French wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev), an aspiring artist, and their eight-year-old daughter Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn), who only speaks French. Hearing the news, Luc Chaltiel (Crispin Glover), a notoriously cruel hired killer, goes on the hunt, arriving in the US to take down Red, stockpiling an array of weapons and other accoutrements of the biz in doing so. Hoping to lay low and collect his take in the stolen loot he went to jail for, Red is now faced with defending his family from a psychopath on a quest for revenge while trying to keep clean.
While watching writer and director Roger Avary‘s latest Lucky Day, you’ll get a clear Pulp Fiction vibe, which is surely by design, and not without some line of ancestry. After all, Avary won an Academy Award for his work with Quentin Tarantino on the screenplay of that movie. With Lucky Day, Avary seems to go for a kind of mix of homage and parody in delivering a chaotic mashup of ultra-violence and black comedy, with a slew of cartoony characters and absurd plotlines, led by the always sinister Glover, who takes two steps back before leaping over the cliffs of insanity in making Luc perhaps the weirdest of his long line of weird on screen personas.
Luc is in need of anger management, a man doused in fury over the loss of his brother, killed by police, his brain snapped into madness so that since that event, he’s convinced himself he’s French, speaking in the most outlandish accent imaginable. He’s renowned among his ilk as a lunatic, demonstrated early on when he visits a co-worker (Tomer Sisley) of sorts, who has a secret stash of munitions, only to bed the man’s girlfriend (Gabrielle Graham) in front of him and then slice her throat so he can avoid that annoying post-coital conversation. Nice guy.
As big as Luc is on screen, he’s not the only one competing for space in the crowded cast, all of them cranked up to twelve, where nothing is meant to be authentic but instead existing in an odd state of miss-reality that is not without some entertainment. That’s mostly because all these actors are very good at being very overly-drawn. From Clifton Collins Jr.‘s art-collecting probation officer to Clé Bennett‘s questionably loyal friend to David Hewlett‘s slimy boss and more, one can’t say none of these people aren’t interesting. This is a movie on full tilt.
However, there is a sense that Lucky Day is a twenty-five-year-old story trying to push its way into a modern sensibility, Avary’s dedication to what is now maybe appropriately called an old school style of storytelling a little threadbare even as well as he delivers it. It’s a good looking film with loads of energy, but it also feels like it’s trying too hard, especially with Luc, who is just short of being an animated villain, one who is very, very dangerous but never taken seriously, which is obviously half the point. At one point, he kills a cop by stomping on him with a sweet lowrider before blowing up his partner with a grenade launching rifle. Oh, and then a witness by pointing a finger at him.
Avary wants to be controversial, or at least raise some eyebrows, the film plenty tough on women and minorities, cops and more. It doesn’t have enough teeth to really matter though, and despite some truly inspiring action setpieces, particularly in the late moments, is less than impactful as it feels it once could have been.