Movie Thoughts: Luck (2022)

• Released: August 5, 2022
  
• Directed by: Peggy Holmes
• Running time: 1 h 45 min
• Rating: 2.5/5

Synopsis

A girl who suffers from permanent bad luck is transported to the Land of Luck, where all luck in the world originates, and has to find a way to get back home while also obtaining some good luck for her best friend.

My Thoughts

People seem to really not like this one. And yes, I can see why. And I'm not saying that because Lasseter is behind this one after many allegations of acting improperly among his female employees at Pixar. It sucks that this is a movie with him behind it, but after all he's only the producer and a shitton of other people worked on this, so I'll be judging it just as a movie without keeping him in mind for now.

And the movie...I hesitate to call it bad despite what other reviews say. Yes, it absolutely has its bad and stupid moments, but at the same time I didn't hate watching it as much as others seemed to. It was honestly just a mediocre film to me. I gave it a 2.5 and not a 3 out of 5 in my score because it was on the lower end of decent for me, but I won't call it outright bad or anything. People still clearly worked hard on this and it does show in some areas.

Most notably, the animation and other visuals are really good. Not perfect, but it's definitely shows that a lot of money, time, talent and effort went into this. The animation is smooth, most of the models look very good (though something about the cat looks uncanny valley to me) and I loved seeing the inner workings of both the worlds of Luck and Bad Luck, with all its intricate mechanisms and such.

The characters also weren't all bad. Sam is pretty standard for a protagonist, but I do like how despite all the bad luck she's suffered all her life she's still mostly positive and also, when she does finally get good luck by finding a lucky penny, her first instinct is not to keep it but to give it to her friend. Heck, one of the main focus points of the movie is getting another lucky penny for her.

The others were kinda mixed, but I did like the Bob the cat and Jerry the leprechaun. They were pretty enjoyable and I like how Bob and Sam eventually became each other's found family, though their relationship did feel a bit forced at times. I didn't care for Hazel as a character (she's just too cookie-cutter of an adorable pwecious child orphan character), but it was also neat to see her friendship and almost sisterly bond with Sam and how they stayed in touch even after Hazel got adopted and Sam left the orphanage.

Those aspects aside, I really don't have anything else good to say about the movie. It looks good, some of the characters and their relationships are likable, but that's it. There's also a bunch of characters in this I didn't like or care for (the dragon and the unicorn for example), the story was decently-executed but overall not my thing and the twist villain and climax...sigh.

The twist villain this time is Babe, the pink dragon who is sort of a leader of the Luck World. She hates bad luck and though she was mostly a good or neutral character throughout the movie, in the climax she suddenly becomes a twist villain and wants to eradicate all bad luck from the world. It happens right the fuck out of nowhere, has not been properly established beforehand, and whats worse is that, due to the godawful climax, her being a villain is over within minutes.

Literally, she wants to eradicate all bad luck and in order to do so steps onto the luck-spreading mechanism, Sam gives a speech about how important bad luck is and that good can come out of it, and Babe instantly becomes her neutral self again. Then suddenly there's a small mishap where they almost lose one of the luck crystals, but that's again literally solved within a few seconds. 

This whole climax is just...wrong. Babe's turn comes out of nowhere, the speech doesn't feel powerful (it should, remember this is the climax of the story), Babe instantly turns good again once she hears it, someone drops the crystal and they almost lose it, someone else grabs it within seconds and it's over. And despite this all sounding like it happens in a short time span (it does), the climax still feels slow as fuck. A climax. The biggest or most intense or emotional point of a story should never feel like this. I was genuinely bored out of my mind during this climax. The rest of the movie was at least serviceable to me, mostly mediocre but had its good points. But then this lame-ass climax ruined the last ten minutes.

So I don't think this is even really a bad movie, but it just has some issues. It's pretty dull aside from some likable characters, the animation looks good but is nothing that noteworthy and the twist villain and climax are just...really bad.