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Lucky Ones, The

EMAILPRINTRoadside Attractions

Lucky Ones, The reviews
53
7.7 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 25 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 10 votes
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Comedy  |  Drama

Written by: Neil Burger
Dirk Wittenborn

Directed by: Neil Burger

Release Date:
Theatrical: September 26, 2008
DVD: January 27, 2009

Running Time: 113 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: R for language and some sexual content

Starring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins, Michael Pena, Molly Hagan, Mark L. Young, Howard Platt, Arden Myrin, and Coburn Goss

T.K. Poole, Colee Dunn and Fred Cheever arrive in New York from Germany only to find their connecting flights canceled due to a power outage. Anxious to get to their respective destinations, they agree to share a rented minivan to suburban St. Louis where Cheever is to reunite with his wife and teenage son. From there, the other two plan to fly to Las Vegas where the macho T.K. wants to make an important stop before seeing his fiancee and the tough yet naive Colee plans to pay a visit to a fallen fellow-soldier's family. But when Cheever's homecoming turns out to be a far cry from what he anticipated, the trio's one-day drive expands into an impromptu cross-country marathon. (Roadside Attractions)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

75

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

This formula is fraught with pitfalls, but the characters and the actors redeem it with a surprising emotional impact.

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75

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

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75

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.

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70

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

I'd hate to guess whether most Americans know, any more than these fictional partygoers, what soldiers go through in Iraq. But if the market for movies about the war is any indication, they don't want to.

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70

The New York Times Laura Kern

Because the lead actors work so well together, adding depth and levels of vulnerability to fairly underwritten roles, the emotional consequences of the sense of displacement these "lucky" characters -- lucky to be alive, lucky to have met one another -- must deal with always ring true.

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67

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The Lucky Ones isn't dull, and the actors do quite nicely, especially McAdams, who's feisty, gorgeous, and as mercurial as a mood ring.

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67

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Like its lead characters, Lucky is wounded, lost, and impractical, but it has a messy, winning humanity and an agreeably leisurely pace that almost redeems it.

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63

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

As close as a movie about three Iraq war soldiers should come to mediocre TV comedy.

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63

Premiere Stuart Levine

While the journey is somewhat bumpy and awfully contrived at times, the characters making the trek are ones we don't mind being cooped with for long stretches of highway.

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63

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The weakest aspect of The Lucky Ones is by far the conclusion, which is flat and contrived.

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63

TV Guide Ken Fox

An entertaining road movie with a topical point: The three passengers on this cross-country trip are U.S. soldiers who've just returned from Iraq.

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63

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though the lead performances are uniformly good, the film seems hazy in its focus from the start. Many of the scenes seem to simply meander.

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58

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

It's not a political film, but it's also not a bland recitation of homilies about the honor of serving one's country. It's a jokey road movie, in which three soldiers heading home from Iraq are forced into a cross-country van ride together.

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55

NPR Bob Mondello

There's something centrally pat and predictable about the coincidence-laden story, and by the time they get to Vegas, The Lucky Ones has been all but done in by a surfeit of serendipity.

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50

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.

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50

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.

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50

The Hollywood Reporter Sura Wood

This moderately engaging, offbeat film requires a patience that audiences haven't demonstrated recently for stories concerning the fate of soldiers at home or abroad.

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50

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Burger is so respectful of the trio that he never gets under their skin. Apart from the generosity of strangers who pay tribute to the soldiers with little acts of kindness, you get the same generic observations of any road movie.

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50

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

If this is meant to look fresh while still being sensitive, it doesn't and it isn't.

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50

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

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50

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

As the film meanders, the powerful moments barely outnumber the ridiculous. And another excellent performance from McAdams isn't quite good enough to mask the distractions.

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40

Variety Todd McCarthy

It's hard to find the genuine heartfelt moments in The Lucky Ones.

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40

Village Voice Vadim Rizov

Its hopelessly schematic road-trip arc (bond-fight-reconcile-repeat) grows increasingly tedious.

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30

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Could be filed under "wacky misfire."

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25

New York Post Kyle Smith

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.7 (out of 10) based on 10 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Bryan S gave it an8:
More subtle/less obvious than I expected, *for the most part* ... a couple scenes in the middle with odd clippy stereotypes -- not on the part of the main actors -- fell completely flat for me.

John T gave it a10:
If you cannot find the sincerity in this movie, you may have to check yourself. While it is not billed as the most "realistic" of welcome home veteran movies, it does an AMAZING job of hitting the right notes on the emotional scale. It is a more heartfelt Little Miss Sunshine with a bit of reality check in the middle. Obviously between the hard right and hard left, critics did not see fit to give it a good score. Watch this movie.

Michelle S gave it a10:
I thought this movie was great, as long as you are not trying to get some deep meaning out of it. It was entertaining and that's all I expected out of it. I like that the story was different from other movies and I liked how the characters slowly unfolded. The movie made me laugh and held my interest and it made me want to watch it again, so in my book that makes it good.

Jay H. gave it a7:
The strong performances from the three leads makes this an interesting tale, very nicely paces and I never lost interest. Entertaining, touching and at times it's finny, Good job.

Chad S gave it a7:
In the novel "Trespass", author Valerie Martin demonstrates her assertion that young Americans are less concerned with war than their kindred spirits from the Vietnam era, in a bar scene where the protagonist's father observes the inelegance of war coverage being treated as a background visual while loud music throbs, and college-aged people hook up as they swill cheap beer. Although nobody is paying attention to the lonely television, at least somebody made an effort to acknowledge that life during wartime isn't business as usual. Perhaps it's the bartender, or the owner, who put the war on. That's better than the bar in "The Lucky Ones", where the college-aged patrons ignore, not the televised war, but the stars of that televised war, the veterans themselves, who are insignificant compared to the going-ons of some "American Idol"-type program. Unlike the people's choir in the title song from Neil Young's last album, the three girls that Colee(Rachel McAdams) tries to chat up aren't "living with war in [their] heart[s] everyday." The "I" on a girl's sweatshirt may stand for Indiana, but on a metaphorical level, the "I" represents the difference between soldiers and civilians. There's no "I" in the army; in a platoon, especially a platoon on tour, where soldiers meld into a "we" to keep themselves alive. The letter is so foreign to Colee, she asks. The acoustic guitar, the weapon of the folksinger(as Woodie Guthrie wrote, "This machine kills fascists.") is both a commodity and an object of sentiment in "The Lucky Ones". There's nobody around to write a protest song for the troops, so maybe Colee will have to write one herself. David Lowery(of Cracker, and the newly reformed Camper Van Beethoveen) was wrong, the world does need another folksinger. What it doesn't need is more "American Idol" winners. In "The Lucky Ones", we can see that the bravest thing a soldier can do, is reporting to duty, and getting on the plane.

Tim G gave it an8:
Top of the line acting...very insightful writing.

Patricia B gave it an8:
Surprisingly good. It doesn't meander as critics claim; it simply chooses not to go in cliched directions and you may not know the significance of a certain scene until it pays off several scenes later. That's what I call refreshing. People should NOT think this is a political film. It's not. It does NOT take a position on the war. It simply has three soldiers as the leads. Their journey is funny and real, and deviates from well-worn paths in the best possible way.

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