Admirable film.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Blistering performances.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Blonde girl Leslie buys a lottery ticket and forgets her driver's license at the convenient store. Ben Keller (Colin Hanks) is a bumbling accountant who's in love with the firm's secretary Lucy St. Martin (Ari Graynor). She quits after an affair with the boss goes sour. Ben has known Lucy since childhood but she couldn't care less until he wins the $36 million lottery. His mother Pauline (Ann-Margret) found the ticket and cashed it in. Detective Harold Waylon (Jeffrey Tambor) is investigating a series of missing blonde women.This is a black comedy that doesn't quite get to being funny. The black part is all there. The comedy part tries to be there. Ari Graynor is trying so hard. Colin Hanks is more or less the straight man. He has the persona of a bunny rabbit with a butcher's knife. Director Gil Cates Jr. isn't able to pull it off. He's not a particularly good director or a guy who does comedy. This doesn't working.

Lucky is a serial killer's tale through the eye of a cynic. It's a dark comedy that anyone can easily enjoy.The good. Surprising scenario, nicely put together. When you think it's going to go left, it goes right. Imaginative ideas in the story. Excellent ending. This is not your Hollywood mush, it has realism mixed in the movie flair.The bad. A few logical hitch, but easily ignored.The ugly. Nothing.The result. If you like films that are different, offbeat, this is for you. Everyone else should at least give it a try.

The director, Gil Cates, does what he can to pep up this bizarre story without distracting directorial displays, but the screenplay doesn't give him much to work with.It's not impossible to make very funny movies about serial killers. "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Kind Hearts and Coronets" are both successful. But this movie doesn't seem to know where it wants to go. It's an ineffective hash of comedy and horror and it gets nowhere.As comedy it fails because there's nothing particularly funny about it, outside of one scene towards the opening, in which Ari Graynor interrupts a board meeting to tell some intimate and disgusting secrets about the chairman. It's a nicely caught moment.But -- well, what is the story about, anyway? A greedy and noisy young blond marries the office nerd, Colin Hanks, for his money after he wins the lottery. It turns out that this nebbish has no idea how to handle this sudden flow of cash and, on top of that, is the notorious serial killer the police are hunting. There are three bodies buried in the back yard, in addition to those cadavers he's left on the spot. So what does Graynor do when she digs up the bodies? (There is no hint of cadaverine.) She drags them and buries them somewhere else, an act which, along with one or two other utterly inexplicable acts, leads to her conviction as the serial killer and after a year or so, Hanks visits her in prison for the first time. She heaps her calumny upon him. And then what? She quietly asks him to keep visiting her and smiles gently. The last scene is an appealingly artsy overhead shot, as the director's joints creak while he reaches for SOMETHING to serve as a climactic moment.Ari Graynor is almost always loud and teetering on hysteria, which isn't funny. Colin Hanks looks like the guy in some TV commercial who tries to fix a home appliance and gets shocked.What does it all mean? The mismatched love, the lottery, the serial murders? Your guess is as good as mine. It all reminds me of a stew I once made out of canned foods whose sell-by dates were rapidly approaching. I called it an "olla podrida." This movie turned out better than the stew. The movie is at least a "ragout chez mois."

Very rarely do I have any desire to post a review. I've seen it, I know what I think, and usually someone else has said everything that needs to be said. Not so with "Lucky."This film shocked me with its amorality. And I liked it.Before I watched this, I thought, perhaps, that it would be akin to "Dexter" - a serial killer that the viewer is asked to empathize with, maybe forgive, and perhaps even root for. I mean, what else could I expect from what the synopsis seems to suggest is a serial killer rom-com. I was wrong. No one in this film is asking for forgiveness. No one in this film seems to even imagine that a universal or objective morality exists which would pass judgement.This is one of the only, if not the only, film I have seen that exemplifies rationally self- interested actors carrying on their affairs as though no religious or societal morality existed or, at the least, was valid. Even in the films based on Ayn Rand's fiction (a person who championed "the virtue of selfishness" and fought against religion and collectivism/humanism), there was always a wink or a nod when some character violated the Judeo-Christian-humanist morality. The same can be said of most of the horror and "shock" films - the shock and horror are usually caused by reactions to the violation of societal norms. Here, there is nothing. One previous reviewer implied the film was boring. I wouldn't go so far, though I would accept "anti-climatic." Indeed, amorality is certainly that. If one starts from a place where killing and kissing are of equal objective moral value - none whatsoever - then it stands to reason that neither occurrence has any higher meaning.In "Lucky", the lack of regard for morality, as understood by the majority of the populace, is not obvious. It isn't a clear part of the plot. It isn't relied upon to engender fear or revulsion. I almost didn't notice it until near the end of the film. It is as if the film was made entirely by people unaware that such a concept as "objective morality" even existed. Of course it wasn't. If for no other reason than that, "Lucky" deserves praise.