DIRECTOR: Peggy Holmes
CAST: Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Flula Borg, Lil Rel Howery, Colin O’Donoghue, John Ratzenberger, Adelynn Spoon, Katie DiCicco
RUNNING TIME: 105 mins
CERTIFICATE: PG
BASICALLY…: An unlucky young woman (Noblezada) wanders into the magical land of luck…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
It’s going to be hard to talk about Luck, the first animated feature from Skydance Animation, without mentioning the unlucky fact about who the company hired to be their head honcho. John Lasseter, whose thirty-year reign as the chief creative officer at Pixar (and, for a short while, Disney’s entire animation department) came to an end after he was alleged to have had a history of sexual misconduct, was quickly snatched up by Skydance to run their new line of animated features. Understandably, though, his hiring hasn’t gone down well with a number of people, including Emma Thompson who was originally attached to this project but then left when Lasseter came on board, but Skydance and eventual distributors Apple TV+ seem to be embracing their gain nonetheless, by advertising Luck as being from the creative mind behind Toy Story and other Pixar classics (which, in a sense, is still true).
Or perhaps, they’re pushing the Pixar angle hard not exactly because Lasseter is involved, but because Luck is desperately trying to be a Pixar movie through and through – but completely lacks everything that makes the most top-tier Pixar movies so memorable and magical in the first place.
Luck, directed by Peggy Holmes (whose own history with Disney includes directing a couple of the Tinker Bell movies for their offshoot Disney Fairies brand), follows a young woman named Sam (Eva Noblezada) who for most of her life has dealt with severe bad luck. One day, she finds a lucky coin which suddenly gives her the best luck in the world, but it belongs to a talking black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg, giving his Scotty voice something to do while waiting for that next Star Trek movie to get off the ground), whom she follows into the Land of Luck, which is responsible for distributing all the good and back luck to every corner of the world. There, Sam and Bob face a series of challenges, meet new friends, learn some valuable life lessons, and all sorts of stuff you’ve seen in so many other animated movies.
None more so, in particular, than the works of Lasseter’s former stomping ground Pixar, whose work is being profoundly copy-and-pasted here without any of the imagination, creativity, or even the visual beauty that the leading animation studio has become known for. The plot is exceptionally paper thin, to a point that it barely feels like there’s even a plot happening at all, since most of the movie is spent just guiding the audience through this incredibly generic and uninteresting world, while occasionally there’ll be some kind of conflict that’s resolved within minutes. There’s nothing in this supposedly magical world of luck that comes across as whimsical or charming, not even the citizens who are made up of leprechauns, pigs and other random creatures, as it all feels so robotic and lifeless. Most of that comes from the oddly stiff animation; it’s not that it’s bad necessarily, because you can certainly see the textures and details on characters’ fur and skin, but all the characters move and talk as though there’s an invisible leash attached to them, which prevents any energetic or exaggerated cartoon body movements that one would expect in this fully-animated film by a major studio. In this case, it seems like the animators had very little budget to add these vital movements to the characters, which has forced them all to move, speak, and emote with such little life or enthusiasm that it very quickly becomes boring to watch.
The overall writing, too, feels unambitious, since it makes no effort to make any of its characters come to life, and instead assigns them endless and tedious exposition dialogue about parts to this world that are just not worth caring about. What the creative team behind Luck seem to think is that classic Pixar movies like Monsters Inc., WALL-E and Inside Out are successful with audiences simply because they create fantastical worlds based on pre-existing concepts like emotions or the fear of monsters in the closet, but in fact it’s the people that live in those worlds who everyone remembers the most, from monster duo Mike and Sully to Joy, Sadness, Anger and the other emotions in Riley’s head. Even in some of their weaker efforts, including the recent Lightyear, you could still identify who Buzz Lightyear is because, well, it’s Buzz Lightyear. In Luck, not a single character has even a fraction of the instant lovability of those classic characters, because the writing leaves them with practically no personality beyond explaining how this world works, and they have dialogue which is both written and performed as though they’re aware that the core audience is made up of very young children who don’t yet know the difference between being talked down to and being treated like they’re actually smart.
Even for little kids, Luck is a surprisingly dull sit, one that has the potential to bore young children so much that they’ll just want to do the exact opposite of what putting on a movie like this is supposed to do, and get up and run around the living room, making as much fuss for Mum and/or Dad as possible instead. That’s because this movie isn’t entertaining, fun, or even colourful enough to provide a meaningful distraction for an hour and a half, and feels cynically put together to cash in on the successful Pixar formula as well as the creative input of its ousted former leader. It’s an unlucky start for Skydance Animation, who currently have a few more projects in development – including one by another Pixar veteran, Brad Bird – and, as yet, a distinctive personality to differentiate itself from the far more productive and influential animation studios out there.
Hopefully they’ll find their own groove soon enough, and that Luck was just a means of testing the waters before going all in with their next few outings – but for now, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to improve their own luck in the future.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Luck is a dull and unambitious debut feature for Skydance Animation, which uses the familiar Pixar formula (overseen by former Pixar head John Lasseter) but with none of the imagination, charm, visual beauty, or writing to match even some of the lesser movies by that other studio, making it a lifeless, consequence-free and overall boring movie that not even kids will be that interested in watching.
