‘Lucky’ review: Anya Taylor-Joy plays an identity-swapping con woman in an Apple TV thriller with her own identity issues

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In a good con artist story, signs are rarely the central characters, but they are often just as important.

The strangely rich sign is an indication that the rogues are the heroes and the tale has eat-the-rich overtones, making satire the last resort of every desperate man.

An overly sympathetic tag is an indication that the tricksters are villains, or at least anti-heroes, so desperate that they throw away class solidarity to make a quick buck.

And if the tag is a MacGuffin, throwing out some meaningless keywords without anything concrete to invest in, then the rest of the story will be delightful. Otherwise you will feel inadequate to the point of meaninglessness.

This is the main drawback of Apple TV devices lucky It takes place before the events of the series, makes no sense, and therefore doesn’t necessarily add anything to the main story, which is the only reason nothing appears in the seven-episode limited series. But it represents the choices made in an adaptation that eliminates the entirety of the book being adapted and replaces those elements with dissonant bits and pieces that fail to generate a consistent tone, theme, or pace. It’s a show about a heroine who swaps identity and has no sense of her own identity.

Not even Marissa Stapley’s book is particularly good. It’s a trashy beach read with an interesting main character. It’s more that Jonathan Tropper’s handling of the material is half trivial, half self-important commentary, and nothing in particular, even though Anya Taylor-Joy and the strong cast work hard to swim against the undercurrent.

Taylor-Joy plays Lucky, a young con woman reluctantly raised in life by her now-imprisoned con father, John (Timothy Olyphant).

Lucky and her husband, Carrie (Drew Starkey), enjoy one last night of festivities in Las Vegas before fleeing the country with a suitcase containing nearly $10 million in cash, money her father embezzled from an elaborate fraud perpetrated by his mother (Annette Bening (Priscilla)) and a wealthy, shady boss (William Fichtner (Whitaker).

What is this scam? Stupid thing about oil. I’m not even sure if this is the deception I mentioned above because it’s amorphous. Who is the victim? Are we? Does it matter? Is there something this troper could have done regarding price fixing in the oil industry? maybe. Did he get anything at all from that background here? no.

Anyway, after said night of partying, Lucky wakes up alone. Did something happen to Carrie or is Lucky the mark? It is absolutely impossible to care, but things start moving so quickly that “caring” becomes immaterial.

Almost immediately, Lucky is on the run from Priscilla and her chief enforcer, Dutch (Clifton Collins Jr.), and a tough-as-nails FBI agent (Aonjanu Ellis Taylor) determined to bring everyone down. Like the Harlen Coben adaptation that became a hit on Netflix I will find youit’s another triangular quest that allows or requires each piece of the show to be delivered in triplicate, at the expense of what must be a very clean “escape or die” momentum.

Anyone who has read the book will have noticed that its main plotlines involve Lucky’s search for her mother and her possession of a winning lottery ticket that she knows she cannot cash because she is a woman wanted on a fraud charge related to bilking elderly people out of their investment income. Every bit of it has been cut, to the point where I wonder why, if all Apple, Tropper, and executive producers Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine wanted to do was make a show about a reluctant con woman with a con man father, any source material at all was needed. This is as much as a remake of Paper moon As is the adaptation luckywhich is definitely not the case.

Tropper and series seem to hate the lightness of the book, the idea that you can commit fraud and still be a redeemable heroine, without having the intellectual heft necessary to complicate things in a meaningful way. Trooper Your friends and neighborsWhile it’s not perfect, it does many of the same things much better, and neither show comes close to the level of moral ambiguity that challenges the viewer in the Trooper series. Banshee.

Participating in the ongoing “Everything’s at Wrong Length” epidemic on television, luckyAt seven episodes, the length is completely wrong. Anything shorter and things probably move quickly enough that we ignore how poorly developed each supporting character is; Anything longer would have allowed the story to feel entirely populated by real characters, not plot catalysts played by overqualified performers.

The series provides viewers with an almost entirely pilot episode Run Lola RunChase style, with Taylor-Joy’s Lucky weaving in and out of casinos and making several daring escapes, all while changing her hairstyle and looking in unconvincing ways since Taylor-Joy is so special. Still, it’s entertaining, and Taylor-Joy enjoys playing a woman who’s easily able to inhabit multiple personalities, all while sneaking in and out of the casino’s labyrinthine aisles and hopping across different trucks at the rest stop. Jonathan Van Tulleken, who directed the first and last episodes of the series, is not good at the lighter elements of the story, but he gets things moving.

Then there are a couple of episodes where the pieces are being moved around the chessboard – man, lucky Not on the same level as Taylor-Joy’s recent limited series, The Queen’s Gambit – With repeated viewing and more changes in outfit and hairstyle. Finally, the series concludes with two episodes that build to a climax in which every twist is accurately predicted.

Episode 4 falls in the middle, directed by Jett Wilkinson, which involves an excruciating car chase through Long Beach playing San Diego and plenty of characters yelling at each other and emphasizing the line of dialogue that gives the episode its title — “Are we bad people?”

The answer would theoretically be “yes” and I would theoretically be perfectly willing to make a show in which the main characters constantly confront their flaws. This is a good drama! But in luckythe characters are, for the most part, barely characters, which makes it difficult to invest in whether or not they are “bad” or “good.”

When Lucky and Cary yell at each other, it’s not a fair fight because one is the main character of the series played by a versatile actress and the other is someone played by someone (Starkey has been good at other things in the past, but Cary is a useless role).

Priscilla and Whittaker yelling at each other is more of a fair fight, since Bening and Fichtner are equally good actors. However, he is on a slippery autopilot and she is mostly there to conjure up his memories Grifterswhich doesn’t work when the material’s sense of moral ambiguity is far less nuanced than the vague pragmatism that drives Stephen Frears’ classic book. Thanks to Bening, it’s possible to go seven episodes without wondering why Priscilla is defined by her love of horses, her love of her dull, boring son (at least she knows he’s a waste of time) and nothing else. Priscilla is the main antagonist of the series and is a cipher brought to life in part by a great actor.

See also Ellis-Taylor, who is so powerful and so intense that you barely realize that the only things we know about Agent Rand are things other characters clumsily tell her about themselves. Ellis Taylor and Oliphant provided the latter justification The reboot season is its beating heart and it’s disappointing that no one is running lucky He was able to utilize that chemistry for more than a scene or two. Often times, Ellis-Taylor has to share her scenes with Mo’s agent McRae Gates and with Eric Lange as her strict boss, and McRae and Lange are stuck with characters who might as well have been labeled “Generic Partner” and “Generic Boss.”

Taylor-Joy and Olyphant are two of the most notable characters in the series: the former because Lucky is a fun and entertaining character, even if getting rid of with The book’s flashback structure removes most of the depth of her character’s reluctance; The latter because both Olyphant and Trooper are smart enough to emphasize the flaws in his charming, trafficker archetype.

But John doesn’t have much of a personality either, and it’s hard to take this thin, listless musing “It’s hard to be the son or daughter of a career criminal/con man” seriously. Or in a humorous way. Or dramatically. whatever lucky wants to be or thinks it can be, it doesn’t come together as anything more than an uneven diversion from a great Fiona Apple song.