Neil Burger’s (“The Illusionist”) latest film, “The Lucky Ones,” has recently had its full-length trailer released, and the film is set to be released this fall on September 26th (following its September 10th premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival). It is set in the traditional road film format, but with one twist, the three stranglers traveling from New York to Las Vegas all happen to be veterans from the Iraq war.
Rachel McAdams stars as a wounded war veteran on a quest to return her dead boyfriends guitar back to his family, in hopes of forming a connection, Michael Pena is returning to his wife, but with a Hemingway-esque injury and Tim Robbins is a worn-down middle aged solider on his way to the casinos. It is great to see McAdams in something of substance after her thin roles in “Wedding Crashers” and “The Family Stone” [ed. but dude, she made the most of both roles, and was fab]
What will be interesting to watch is to see if “The Lucky Ones” can break the failure streak that has been associated with all Iraq war movies of late (“Lions for Lambs” “In the Valley of Elah” “Stop-Loss”). It’s saving grace could be the fact that it is a movie that deals with the repercussions of the war through an unrelated narrative. This may keep it from shoving the message down our throats, as the previous attempts have certainly done. By taking a step back and letting us watch the characters outside of the war it may allow the viewer to identify more with the loss and feelings of being left behind that the characters are experiencing as they travel across the country which used to be so familiar but now has an alien feel to it.
It’s getting decent word of mouth, so who knows. It might be nice to see one Iraq War-related film make more than $4 dollars at the box-office to show that maybe someone still cares about the mess over there and or at least, the poor kids that have to fight it for us.
