John Lasseter’s First Film Since Leaving Pixar Is Cursed To The Core

Sam Greenfield is the luckiest person on Earth, and has been since the day he was born. It’s bad enough that Sam’s birth parents left her at the Summerland Home for Girls shortly after she came into this world, and she’s about to leave the program after spending 18 years without finding home forever. But a more mundane sort of calamity also seems to follow Sam from day to day: this poor girl can’t make a sandwich without dropping a slice of bread on the floor, jelly down, taking a shower without knocking over a broom that lock her in the bathroom, or shoot a lip-sync video with her “little sister” Hazel without the set crashing down on her. Rotten Luck essentially follows Sam with the same Rube Goldberg-inspired relentlessness that Death stalks teenagers in the “Final Destination” franchise, just minus the sadistic creativity that makes those movies so fun (or any other kind of creativity, for that matter). .

Alas, the real source of Sam’s existence is due to a darkness of another kind: through no fault of her own, she has the deep misfortune to be the main character in the first film that John Lasseter has produced since the Pixar’s disgraced deity has accepted his new job at Skydance Animation, and every charmless minute of “Luck” seems to betray the mutual desperation of this arrangement. No matter how much Sam’s fortunes may seem to improve by the end of this story – no matter how sincerely she comes to the inevitable conclusion that having someone like Hazel in her life is the ultimate blow. of serendipity – our unfortunate heroine will always be trapped in a “Monsters Inc.” charmless, half-baked and totally uninviting. imitation for all eternity. The only silver lining for it is the lack of talking cars.

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As is the case with only an extreme subsection bad movies, however – a certain faulty (but still far superior) Lindsay Lohan vehicle being chief among them – luck plays an unusually literal role in explaining the failure of this headache.

On the one hand, it doesn’t just come down to bad luck that Lasseter wasn’t able to bottle up the Pixar magic and bring it with him to his new gig. On the other hand, the concept of luck itself is at the heart of why this sub-Netflix streaming fiasco is such a chore. Specifically, the misconception that anyone could care “where they came from,” let alone be intrigued enough to attend a two-hour tour of the generic Wonka-like underworld where Ladybugs deliver. luck leaves to lucky pigs that create lucky crystals for specific lucky events (i.e. “having a good hair day” or “walking in dog poo”) which are then classified in a machine which disperses them randomly in our universe. To be fair to director Peggy Holmes, who struggled with a script devoid of any trace of an animated spark, I never thought how boring the notion of luck would be to explore until I watched. Sam follows a black cat named Bob (a Scots-accented Simon Pegg) to Wonderland where he is made.

The world of luck or whatever it’s called is an unattractive boredom from the moment Sam arrives, and the movie has nowhere to go once he gets there – except downstairs and into the hell. Bad luck world that exists below. Voiced by a valiant Eva Noblezada, who maintains the vibrancy of a birthday party princess despite her character having all the personality of a GPS, Sam is determined to stay in the lucky land until she may find enough things for Hazel to get adopted, but there’s never any sense of weight or purpose to her quest.

The magical world of “Luck” has none of the everyday creativity that allowed “Monsters Inc.” to tickle the imagination, none of the narrative integrity that allowed “Inside Out” to confuse characters with emotions, and none of the wonders that made “Spirited Away”‘s bathhouse feel like a real place that existed just out of sight. Credited to Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger and Kiel Murray, the film’s script isn’t so much arranged as a story as a parade of semi-linked stimuli. Here are some bunnies in hazmat suits, there’s a dragon voiced by Jane Fonda, now Sam has to pretend she’s Latvian (don’t ask). This building seems to be copied and pasted from Asgard, these two are connected by high-speed bumper cars, and they all seem to be plastic.

Bob has a practical exposition to justify most of this stuff – usually something a lot more convoluted and less interesting than “five-year-olds have short attention spans” – but “Luck” certainly raises a lot of questions for a movie that was designed to keep kids quiet for 100 minutes, and every new detail only reinforces the suspicion that luck is too defined by its lack of internal logic to sustain a story that relies so heavily on explaining its functioning.

Very young children might be amused by the film’s over-fiery pace, and even by some of the more outlandish characters it passes along the way (it’s hard to go wrong with Flula Borg voicing a unicorn named Jeff), but the most older people will struggle with the lack of something to hold on to, and perhaps also with the feeling that they’ve seen a better-made version of this story so many times before. “Luck” is a terrible idea for a movie, poorly executed, and by someone who knew better. The best thing I can say about the finished product is that unlike most forms of bad luck, this one is wonderfully easy to avoid.

Rating: D+

“Luck” will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday, August 5.

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