Why LUCK is DISAPPOINTING (and boring + ratio)

Out of all the animated films I've seen this year, Luck is one of them.

You want a great film that has a female protagonist, a black talking cat sidekick, and she has to endure through bad luck and keep pushing forward and has an actual MESSAGE? Kiki's Delivery Service

I feel like this is a really wasted opportunity to talk about how the adoption system actually screws people over. Kids who never get adopted don't just get a free apartment and a shiny new job handed to them, they gotta figure a lot of shit out on their own and it's scary and hard. If you're going to have an orphan character with the entire premise being that she's incredibly unlucky... maybe show the actual bad parts about being orphaned?????? idk. strikes me as kind of an odd choice.

There's a fable about determining the nature of "luck", which begins when a farmer's horse runs away. The village sympathizes, saying it's "bad luck." The farmer replies "Maybe." Eventually, the horse comes back, and brings two horses with it. "What good luck!" the village cries. "Maybe," the farmer replies. When trying to break the new horses, the son falls off and breaks his leg. Bad luck? Maybe. While the son is healing, the army comes through looking for recruits, but the son is passed over due to his condition. Good luck? Maybe. Good and bad luck may feel as such in the moment, but only time will tell how these passing instances actually affect our lives. I just feel that if you're going to make a film literally about luck, there's so many avenues to explore about how luck manifests, and for creators so renowned for elaborate storytelling and world building, there were a lot of missed opportunities.

Monsters Inc. had a message beyond "monsters collecting screams", and that's why it worked. "Laughter is more powerful than fear" is a great message for children to learn. Still can't figure out what Luck's message is.

Fun fact: Saberspark has more subscribers than the official Apple TV YouTube Channel

the adoption system and what happens to kids at 18 is such an important subject, and i was hoping when you mentioned her story that they'd dive into that more but.. yeah. disappointing

We watched this movie with my kids, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. There was nothing me or my kids did not quite understand and they would love some toys based on luck, and I made the whole thing up. I have no kids neither apple tv.

This reminds me of that scene in Zootopia where Judy first gets to the city and is tricked by someone she was trying to help, is bullied at work, eats gross microwave carrots, and gets stuck in wet cement. THAT was a well done, kid friendly presentation of real bad luck and when Judy just keeps going to work despite everything, it makes her so much more relatable and interesting to follow. I haven't seen Luck yet, but it sounds like something like this could have done alot for the story and character growth.

Hang on, so we've got a movie that... - Features a young woman, disenchanted with her "terrible" life that is actually quite good - Meets a talking cat - Falls into a magical world - Struck with a magical malady - Returns to her normal life, with newfound appreciation for it This is the Wal-Mart brand of Miyazaki's "The Cat Returns".

Luck kind of feels like that one movie you forget in like 3 days and when someone brings it up it’s just like “oh yeah I’ve watched that” and you continue whatever conversation you had before like normal

My biggest issue with this movie honestly was how ungrateful she seemed for the things she DID have. Like all the good things that she did have didn't matter because she only focused on the negative, and while that could've been the point they didn't expand on that at all. Granted I watched it with my little sister while half asleep so I may have missed a few things, but even my little sister who is 14 years younger than me said "at least she's not homeless, at least she has friends". When an 8 year old calls your movie out on the bs, there's a problem.

The facial expressions were so dulled compared to the excellent voice acting. The voice would be filled with emotion and the face of the character would be giving NOTHING. I’m so glad you reviewed this movie. I felt the exact same way about it.

Honestly, I wish the film didn't have the whole "mc transports into a fantasy realm revolving around this one specific theme" plotline and had the whole film take place in the real world. The most engaging parts of the movie to me was the cat-chasing scene and watching her deal with her unluckiness in her day-to-day life. You can still keep the talking cat and the lucky coin plotline, you can still have her realize that life is less about luck and more about how you react to the events that happen to you. It would have also made it easier to develop the relationship between the mc and the little girl, something I felt was a bit undercooked in the actual movie.

I get the feeling there probably was an earlier draft that had Sam go through hell in order to endure as you said. However, since Lasseter is in charge at Sundance now he probably said "no please change it " since he said something similar during the early production of Zootopia

In terms of her having privileged bad luck, let’s also not forget to point out that she must have a lot of baggage to deal with that could affect her perspective on the world and therefore can make things a lot harder for her. She seems to be psychologically normal, not any signs of complex PTSD or anything else you can get from not having consistent and trustworthy caregivers your whole life. Like I know what kind of trauma I’ve run into with a conventionally relatively decent family life that I’ve been trying to recover over the past 10 years or so I can only imagine what kind of crap someone like her would have to go through. But nope, she is pretty much mentally healthy and clean

I think Luck would have worked better as a children's novel, since runtime is not an issue with a book and you can cram in more exposistion without dragging down the story.

With full respect to the artists who worked hard on this film, unfortunately the overly-safe aesthetics just couldn't bring me to care, personally. We're so far into the age of CGI animated movies that shooting for the "classic" Disney/Pixar-esque look tends to feel generic now. Which is kind of ironic, considering at least 3 out of the 4 recent Pixar films (haven't seen Lightyear yet) tries to break from that with their attempts to push character designs and visual aesthetics. ...And then you have The Bad Guys, which is still probably one of the most impressive executions of aesthetics for a mainstream film release in recent years. High fidelity 3D is nice in some regards, but animation is so much more fun and memorable when it pulls elements from its 2D roots.

I do like how they animated the black cat and his vocal direction. It’s really hard to animate cats and I love how they did it.

Kinda wild they didn't take the more obvious route of "someone's good luck usually results in someone else's bad luck."