This movie has the feeling of a book heavily edited. Nothing really fits into place. Certain scenes have potential, but the film seems to have abandoned their emotional impact in favor of its hackneyed, morally problematic, intensely boring formula.
The opening scenes becomes important later in the film so it would help if the audience understood exactly what is going on. We don’t. The part that I can infer is that a Marine named Logan discovers a picture of a lady in the rubble of some Iraqi battleground, and that picture gives him good luck. Hence the title. Anyway, Logan returns to the US and tries to track down the lady who gave it to him. He tries to thank her for what she did, but ends up not saying anything. The lady’s grandmother, who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be her grandmother, gives him a job working on their dog training and housing facility. The lady--named Beth--doesn’t like him being there, but she has lost a brother in the war and gone through a messy divorce and has a depressed kid so she has a free pass to be a witch for the first third of the movie. Logan is to timid and traumatized from the war to explain why he came, though apparently not to timid to bed her. Complicating matters is Beth’s ex, who is going to do anything to get Beth back.
The movie has some moral problems. First off, Logan is a pretty big jerk for getting intimate with a lady he refuses to tell basic facts related to her life. But maybe we aren’t supposed to support his actions. I believe in the book, his duplicity is a bigger deal. Here it is not: It is only another obstacle standing between two lovers destined to be together. Romantic? Could be, but everything seems a little uninspired. I don’t see a connection between the two protagonists.
A bigger issue is the nonchalant attitude towards alcohol abuse, an especially big problem seeing as the target audience hasn’t hit puberty yet. But I don’t think it is just a moral flaw unrelated to the story--I think the film has characters so wooden, bland, and inexpressive they need to be under the influence of some kind of drug for us to find their romance half-way plausible. Maybe if they used meth the movie might be half-way entertaining.
The film’s problems aren’t the actors fault, though they certainly don’t help matters. Zac Efron (Logan) is trying awfully hard to not be the kid from High School Musical, which means he is paralyzed and emotionless. I guess it fits the character--it would be nice if there was some sign of life, though. Taylor Schilling (Beth) is acceptable, but isn’t able to make her bland character relatable. Blythe Danner (the grandmother) is charming for the first couple minutes, but not in the “wow, I would actually like this person” but in the “if only my parents were like that.” Which is fitting for a movie so distanced from reality and real expressiveness that it seems more like a twelve-year-old girl’s fantasy than a story of true love.
A huge part of the story deals with Keith (Jay R. Ferguson), Beth’s depressed ex. You get the feeling his story arc was of crucial importance to the book (Nicholas Sparks, by the way), but it seems more like a not fully coherent interruption in the movie. Even the final (improbable) river disaster scene ends up more of a plot tie-up than a critical epiphany.
The Lucky One is boring and morally flawed due to an uninspired take on what might be a good book. And I won’t finish this review off with a pun involving the world “luck” because I am too annoyed mine ran out and I ended up having to sit through this.
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