Lucky

An ethnically diverse cast and authentic New York locations help to effectively ground Lucky, a palpably gritty, if familiar, take on the immigrant experience.

Lucky isn’t perfect as a person or a film, but there’s something fitting about this. Escape from his character’s situation won’t ever be clean and Kang ensures to never pretend it will.

Compounding the action’s lack of originality are both the amateurishness of every performance and the wobbly-camera aesthetics. Worse, though, is the wholesale absence of any political point of view on its immigrant-horror-story subject matter, leaving the film feeling like the thinnest type of retread.