Luck Movie Review – Bad is so passé
A smile still appears on my face when I think of Luck, which I watched first day first show, not because I was drooling at the thought of watching a big-budget multi-starrer but because I was curious to see what they had done to 13 Tzameti. (For those not in the know, 13 Tzameti is a cult French thriller which is being remade in English by the director himself. I haven’t watched Intacto, the other film from which scenes have allegedly been lifted.)
God, I’m grinning so much I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know why I’m deriving so much sadistic pleasure at the sheer badness of Luck.
I overheard a teenage girl in the theatre say this during the interval: “It’s SO stupid.” Another chap in a group was saying to his buddy, “Tujhe achcha lag raha hai ye?”
God! You gotta see see Luck to believe it. 80s 90s style dialoguebaazi with barely a real conversation in sight. Half the running time consists of slow motion shots backed by power chords and alaaps and some theme song. I literally counted at least 5 times that Sanjay Dutt made his entry in super-slow motion with fans blowing, surrounded by 3-4 tough customers in designer suits and accompanied by heavy music. Anybody using this more than once in a movie for a character is going to highly piss me off henceforth – I’m fed up of it.
The action shots are almost entirely background music with not even the sounds of people screaming. Come to think of it, the action scenes majorly suck! The climax is a hoot. It’s something Kanti Shah would have directed. Look up Gunda starring Mithunda to know who the great Kanti Shah is.
For heaven’s sake, there’s even an attempted rape scene where the hero kicks in the door and saves the heroine’s izzat. Did I give away an important spoiler? Oh I’m sorry. Not.
The veterans do their jobs competently. There’s only one good scene in the movie. Logically, it’s one of the most stupid scenes, unfortunately, but it’s good only because of the don, Swami. In fact, that’s probably the only real scene in the movie. The rest are all fillers and unconvincing flashbacks and setups.
And the scene in the trailers which looks like it’s from 13 Tzameti, forget it! Even comparing the two would be an insult. This is what happens when you take people who don’t know the ‘a’ of acting.
Biren Mohanti the editor and Amar Mohile the background scorer seem to have done more work than Soham Shah the director. When a film needs so much flashy editing and background music, it’s generally an indication that they need to make up for the lack of strong scenes. The whole effect is that of watching saas-bahu serial sensibilities on the big screen.
As for the mega-hyped Shruti Hasan, well, I’ll be very kind and say that she looks good, but she urgently needs dialogue coaching and acting lessons. Comparisons with her father will be inevitable and she has a long, long, long way to go if she wants to catch up.
Imran Khan. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmmm. Media darling. Wanting to break away from his chocolate boy image. I’ll be very diplomatic again and make the same recommendations as for Shruti Hasan.
You know a movie is in very big trouble when you like the villain more than the heroes. I really wanted Ravi Kishan to kill the hero and heroine and get the 20 crore. At least he made me laugh a couple of times.
Some more about the action scenes. Just getting 12 people to jump from a helicopter and then getting the media to write about ‘daredevil stunts’ doesn’t make a great action scene. Even an action scene needs to be written properly. It needs to have drama. I needs interaction between characters and ups and downs and back and forths of the upper hand. For just one example, how about the climax car chase of Tarantino’s Death Proof. It’s just one guy in a car versus three girls in another car, and it’s a really long sequence. Yet, there are many variations and many moments that make it an honestly edge-of-the-seat nail-biter. And for skydiving action scenes, how about Shoot ‘Em Up – that was fun. Or even Eraser. Many of Luck’s scenes defy basic logic. Guns appearing out of nowhere in the sand, anyone?
So, dear readers, planning to watch Luck? I won’t tell you to watch it or not to watch it – I don’t like being told what to do so I won’t tell you either. But I will say this: I didn’t mind the first Dhoom because it was entertaining enough, but I turned off Dhoom 2 as soon as Abhishek Bachchan appeared with his speedboat after having held his breath underwater for about, maybe, half an hour?
A good indication of how the audience feels about a movie is what they do when the end credits start. In case of Luck, practically everyone, including me, ran for the door.
Tags: Luck
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
A movie with a wonderful tag line: Luck: What the FCUK !!!
It is half entertaining, if you can sit through some parts. Non-hollywood watchers would enjoy it most.
Can someone please tell me if there is a way for me to become a regular blogger on the site … Recently discovered the site and cant get enough of it and would love to contribute as an author as well.
Cheers
A
nice revu! Will still watch it as in our town we have just got India’s cheapest AC digital theater equipped with dolby/DTS where highest class is Rs.25
You are SO lucky. And after watching the film you’ll feel even ‘luck’ier
dude, sorry to get off track…but now i am more curious to know which city is this.
Truly what i’d describe as a Wannabe movie :D
well i have seen both d.o.a and 13 tzameti ,so i am def not gonna this i will watch intacto instead.
I was sure of this one….now am having a sense of deja vu….All the films in recent months with huge promotions have sucked. Somehow I feel that producer know right from the beginning that film is not going to work and so they promote it extensively for months to get the overwhelming opening response and if it run for 1 week also its a win for them…See the movies in near past which had a heavy promotion…Ghazini, Kambakth Ishq, 8*10 Tasveer, Chandni Chowk to China, Luck and the list continues…….
Agree sourav, All of them, including Ghajini suck…
Film publicities have become synonymous with party(political) campaigns ….. i just wish this phase phases off soon.
I have no words to describe my pathetic experience of watching this stupid movie ….. but yeah i did meet a couple (well actually almost half a dozen) of people who really liked the movie.
Look at this trailer of “Luck” :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAC6rGK3I8w
Goodness me, look at how these chaps are bragging about their “Luck”… And here we are, passionate becharas, screaming at the top of our lungs…
As for our dear Sanju Baba, can’t we do at least this much : get together and boycott his films …look at this video to see how he’s unfazed by whatever happened to him and infact uses all this as a publicity stunt…unbelievable..
Whatever it is…you shouldn’t have insulted Kanti Shah like this…
LOL! u nailed it bro!
Soham Shah was recommended to Karan Johar by Komal Nahata. Just a tidbit I read somewhere…
Well think of it this way…You can fault providence when incompetence recommends incompetence to the incompetent… Ahhh Sunday Mornings
Soham’s Shah Kaal itself was a stinker, i badly wanted the tigers to eat alive Vivek Oberoi and his pals in the movie , putting us out of our misery. BTW i believe the 2007 Hollywood flick, The Condemned is also one of the sources of “inspiration” for this “Kalti Classic”.
Regards Imran Khan, i aint being diplomatic, he is an overrated one movie wonder, IMO.
bro i agrees. ‘delhi belly’ with mamoojaan just might prove us wrong. so i hope ;-)
Soham Shah kaun hai?
He is one amongst the many new generation directors who think they can put together a montage of stolen scenes from foreign films and pass them off as their own slick strokes of genius. After lifting scenes/major ideas from the Ghost & the Darkness and Final Destination for the laughable/campy KAAL, he had the alacrity to say that it was actually inspired by the brilliant Sixth Sense. Churao kinhi do sources se, Credit do teesre ka. Nice dodge dude!
What is disgusting/shameful is not the fact that these smart new age directors copy/steal/get inspired. Bollywood’s been doing that for ages. Since Chori-Chori in the fifties, in fact.What sucks is the lack of talent and sincerity in understanding what cinema is about. And the fact that they think they can get away with anything as long as there’s enough hype, publicity and some fresh faced star kids to push their spanking new equivalent of cinematic spam down the audience’s throats. Yuck!
Manoj when Bollywood filmmakers do not acknowledge even internal ( i.e films from other Indian languages ) sources even after paying for the remake rights like in case of KI and Shortkut then the Soham’s of the world would also continue to behave the same way.its high time that people realised that the audience isnt that stupid at all.
haha….But Luck is fun if it is shown free and you take it as a comedy !
The more serious the people became, the more ROFL the movie became…
I wonder why my review is not published on PFC yet :(
One line will say it all, Luck has the potential to be the next cult movie after Gunda. I don’t know what bad ‘luck’ had befallen upon me last night that I went to see the latest release ‘Luck’. What bad karma did I do in my past life that in this life I was destined to go through such a disturbing movie? Never before in my entire life did I walk out of a cinema hall without finishing the movie.
Do read my review up on my blog
haha…you have taken it too seriously. Left a comment on your Blog