Lucky Strike

An example of robust, muscular filmmaking of the “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” variety.

As war movies go, this one’s different and often exciting, with several memorable scenes.

The World War II movie Lucky Strike is part survival thriller and part throwback hymn to military heroism. It’s quite possible to appreciate the kill-or-be-killed action, starring Scott Eastwood as a man caught behind enemy lines, even as its Greatest Generation patriotism feels preserved in amber from another era in cinema and history.

For all its technical impressiveness, Lucky Strike never gathers the narrative momentum and suspense to which it aspires.

Lucky Strike falls apart at many key moments, revealing narrative flaws Lurie planted (or failed to plant) much, much earlier in the film.

Lucky Strike is simultaneously so familiar and so off that it sometimes feels like WW2 movie cosplay. While watching, I thought often about how that is essentially what all period filmmaking is – anyone who's ever seen an unofficial set photo will know what I'm talking about – but whatever movie magic that usually gets us to suspend our disbelief is just totally absent here. Aside from the intellectual curiosity of trying to diagnose that, the viewing experience is fairly dull.

Lucky Strike, a mind-numbingly inert, hyper-patriotic war film, makes little sense and gives even less reason for its existence.

Are spaghetti westerns back? But now we’re doing spaghetti WWII films? The most unintentionally funny WWII movie ever made. Scott Eastwood is a clone of his father, but he may have picked the wrong film to look so handsome in. With never ending beauty cut scenes of the masculine young Eastwood, this film is the definition of “let’s get to the point here”. At times I felt it was written and directed by Tim Robinson and was a PTSD flashback from an episode of I Think You Should Leave. I wonder how the other three solo men who were in the theater with me on opening night felt, or does the lack of attendance do justice.