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75This formula is fraught with pitfalls, but the characters and the actors redeem it with a surprising emotional impact.
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75This 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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75This 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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70Because 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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70I'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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67The 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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67Like 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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63An 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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63Though 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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63As close as a movie about three Iraq war soldiers should come to mediocre TV comedy.
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63The weakest aspect of The Lucky Ones is by far the conclusion, which is flat and contrived.
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63While 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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58It'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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55There'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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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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50The 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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50As 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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50If this is meant to look fresh while still being sensitive, it doesn't and it isn't.
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50More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.
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50Burger 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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50About 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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Its hopelessly schematic road-trip arc (bond-fight-reconcile-repeat) grows increasingly tedious.
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40It's hard to find the genuine heartfelt moments in The Lucky Ones.
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30Could be filed under "wacky misfire."
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25Cheap, 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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User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 9
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Mixed: 0 out of 9
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Negative: 1 out of 9
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BryanS8
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JohnT10
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MichelleS10