Lucky Day

Roger Avary - 2019 - Canada

Made at least twenty years too late, Roger Avary’s Lucky Day belongs to the subgenre of Tarantino-wannabe films that first erupted in the mid-90s, of which Avary’s own Killing Zoe was one of the earliest (and better) examples. Only his third feature since then, Lucky Day is an unpleasant failure in almost every way, with the possible exception of a likeable lead performance by Luke Bracey, (even though his actual character is dimensionless). The film is clearly supposed to be hip, clever, exciting, suspenseful and funny, and it’s not really any of these things. It looks like Avary has collapsed under the weight of his own hubris, hoping against all metaphysical evidence that his lack of genius and humanity can be papered over with occasional pretensions of satire. Winks of self-awareness are supposed to preempt criticism of his film’s pathetic cliches, grating characters, pitiful “comedy” dialogue, and horrendous GCI effects. I can’t say it’s unwatchable, since I watched it all, but it was alarmingly consistent in its capacity to disappoint and confuse an audience with its painful vasicallations between black comedy that doesn’t work and whimsical magical realism that doesn’t work. It’s pointless to itemize every problem, but I'll provide one that's emblematic. A trusted babysitter is brutally stabbed to death by a hit man while her young charge watches. Left for dead, she spends her last gurgling breaths heroically trying to phone the little girl’s mother. Is the situation supposed to be funny? Nothing happens except that she dies in agony. Is it supposed to be irrelevant and forgettable? Avary lingers on it and even cuts back to it to reveal that the woman is still alive. Is it supposed to be gut-wrenching and heartbreaking? It’s impossible to say since the character is never mourned or even mentioned again, not even as the family blissfully dances around fifteen minutes later in the same apartment where the babysitter had just barely been seen spilling her blood all over the floor, utterly forgotten. I don’t believe the point is that our heroes are heartless; I believe this is evidence that Avary himself is heartless and is a failure as a filmmaker thanks to his sociopathic inability to know what human beings respond to in movies. If he doesn’t care about his characters, why should we bother watching them? Obviously, it never crossed his mind that his viewers would feel abandoned and let down for trying to care about his film and its plot. Avary has no vision; he only has a vague idea in his head that wacky situations, smartass dialogue and over-the-top violence are a good enough recipe for a good movie. There’s a reason why entire generations of green filmmakers think it’s easy to make a Tarantino film; it’s because he makes it look so easy, and that’s part of his genius. Tarantino himself, though, moved beyond the affectations of cool postmodernism at some point, since - as a real artist - he opted to evolve, not satisfied with being just one of hundreds of people out there making sub-par Tarantino-esque movies. In contrast, Roger Avary, once Tarantino’s co-writer on Pulp Fiction, is perfectly satisfied being stuck in that genre, even though it essentially petered out 15-20 years ago.