Lucky

Now for a movie review of sorts. The name of the film is Lucky. The only way that I can think of to do this without a ton of spoilers is with the following sentence:

A writer overcomes writer’s block through unusual means.

To say anything else would really take away from the viewing experience. That would hardly be a review, so I must elaborate. By elaborating I am going to go into spoilers galore mode, be warned.

The only reason that I feel compelled to do a review of this movie at all is that all of the reviews that I have read over at Rotten Tomatoes seem to have missed a couple of key events that really change the meaning of the movie. That doesn’t make them wrong or myself right, but it does make a hell of a lot of what happens in the film just impossible. I will get into all that as this spoiler-riddled, review-type-thing continues.

The movie starts with a long, quite introspective, narrative by the main character Millard Mudd (Michael Emanuel). Over the first five minutes or so of the movie, the camera slowly goes through the beer can jungle that is Millard’s home. It continues on as the already drunken Millard realizes that he is out of beer and goes to buy some more. The fact that he takes one beer from the six pack, then forgets the rest of them still sitting on the roof of the car, and continues to drive home is absolute proof of his inebriation. It is no surprise, as the camera shows more and more blurred road-markers, the car veering into the wrong lane and the such, that the drive ends in tragedy. Millard has run over a small dog, but, more importantly, the cans of beer break when the fly off of the top of his car!

Millard, being a good samaritan (which is slang for covering his ass), took the dog home to try to nurse it back to health. The dog was in a pretty bad way, there was not really any way it could actually have been alive if the (really bad, joke-shop style) guts were hanging out. Our hero, Millard, continued to try though. He tried everything Beer and….Well that was about it.

This is the point where all of the reviewers seemed to have missed the point. It is my belief, my strong belief, that the dog was actually dead when he took it to the back yard to bury it. The happy puppy didn’t wake up, no, it was dead as a stone. Millard’s mind, however, was getting stronger.

For the next half an hour or so the movie switches between scenes where the talking dog (David Reivers) is funneling ideas to Millard, and other scenes where Millard is having fantasies about Misty (Piper Cochrane). This is, in my mind, the second clue that the dog wasn’t even there. Later in the movie they make a point of telling you about the girl who works at the liquor store, what days she works, what time she works, what car she drives, where she lives…Yet, it is the ‘dog’ that forces Millard to go out. Millard then meets the ‘real life’ Misty.

Now, here is where it is going to get just a little bit confusing, I will try to keep it on course as best I can. When Millard first meets ‘Misty’, the dog tells him to tell her that she has a nice dog. Misty doesn’t even look down…I don’t think our Millard had a dog with him at all when he first met ‘Misty’. I also don’t believe that Millard and Misty had any sort of a relationship, excepting the possibility that he did the necrophilia thing on her corpse (or perhaps a bit of consensual sex before she realized that she was never going to walk out alive). As the movie played, Millard got more and more vicious with his ‘fantasies’, to the point that it showed ‘Misty’ hanging dead from a rafter; I don’t think that was a dream at all.

There was one scene where his weird fantasy was being shown in normal focus, normal light, and with the ‘Misty’ character laying tied to the bed. The dialogue seemed almost joking, as she asked him what he was going to do to her. The fact that she specifically asked him not to disfigure her face can only bolster my case that there was no dog. In that ‘dream sequence’ it was only Millard and Misty, no one else could have heard about the plea to not damage her face. No one else could have heard ‘Misty’ tell Millard to take a tooth as a trophy, yet, both things did happen. Her face was disfigured and a tooth was taken.

Now there is the issue of the other people that died at Millard’s hand. He killed them all, the dead dog was not involved.

I am relatively sure that Millard killed the lot of them. One of the driving reasons for this assumption is that a twelve-pound, Terrier-mixed, dog could not drag a human body around, much less dig a hole to bury that body in. Add that to the fact that the voice of the dog seemed to come out of Millard’s mouth at least once, and the fact that Millard took over the killing duties. I think it is a case closed, though I am still a bit weirded out by the necrophilia.

When Millard goes out to stalk some women later, it kind of cheapens the experience. It has been him all along. There was never a dog feeding him information. It was always his own mind in turmoil. Possibly the death of the dog just whet his thirst for killing, who knows, but, for the sake of this arguement, the dog died when he initially hit it with the car. Everything that happened after that point was only in his mind.

Hell, even my wife knew that. Millard cracked into some sort of schizophrenia and started taking out the locals. Not so far-fetched when you look at it that way. Had he worked at a post office, we would have a word for him, since he didn’t, we just call him a bad, bad man.

One Reply to “Lucky”

  1. Pingback: Movie Review: Lucky! (redux) « Shadowtwin.com

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