Luck: Film Review
AppleTV+ has been going hard on the promo for the new family animation Luck – I have seen so many London buses with the poster and heard the radio ad countless times – so I assumed it would be awesome but it’s just fine.
The film follows Sam Greenfield (voiced by Eva Noblezada), an orphan who has aged out of the system and been given a little apartment and a job. She has seriously bad luck and things go wrong for her constantly but everything changes when she finds a lucky penny on the street. Unfortunately for Sam, she accidentally flushes it down the toilet! When she discovers the penny belonged to a black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg), she follows him to get more pennies and ends up in the Land of Luck.
This film, the first from Skydance Animation, is wholesome, sincere, inoffensive and super easy to watch. The plot is very simple and basically just follows Sam and Bob as they try to get another lucky penny. However, there is still plenty to love about it, like how the Land of Luck is visualised, the fun penny-cleaning sequence, all the instances of bad luck and the adorable bunnies in hazmat suits.
The dialogue isn’t particularly strong and it doesn’t have as much pizzazz and personality as animations from Pixar, for example. The writing gets particularly bad towards the end when it gets overly sentimental and whacks you over the head with its message about good luck vs bad luck and how they work best together. But I’m sure children won’t notice any of that and be thoroughly entertained for 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The film has a star-studded voice cast including the likes of Whoopi Goldberg as The Captain, Good Luck’s head of security, and Jane Fonda as Babe the Dragon, Good Luck’s boss. But the standout characters have to be the whacky German unicorn Jeff (Flula Borg) and the tiki bar-owning root Rootie (John Ratzenberger). They were so much fun.
Luck has a weak script and feels rather lightweight but I liked the world-building and the stunning visuals and still found it a lovely, comforting watch.
On Apple TV+ from Friday 5th August