The Lucky One
There wasn’t much to choose from this weekend as far as new releases were concerned and so there I was, late Sunday night, watching the new chick flick starring Zac Efron as Logan Thibault, the story of a young Marine whose luck was to find a photo of a girl who he had to meet when he returned to the real world—a world that he did not fit into after his third tour of duty.
This romance, directed by Scott Hicks, has not much comedy but does have a fair amount of predictability. Predictability in that boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, but it’s not smooth sailing. Well, I guess if all went well, the show would be 10 minutes long.
And yes, you know it’s summer when the best they can do is a soldier, a girl and a bully of an ex-husband, played by Jay Ferguson.
Bullies, by the way, don’t go away, they just grow up to be bigger, uglier bullies.
The Lucky One is a watchable 110 minutes, and was better than I had expected it to be. Blythe Danner, plays Ellie, Beth’s grandmother, and who, apart from being Gweneth Paltrow’s mother, is always a delight and has more acting credits to her name than I can list here.
Efron is OK for this more mature part, but he is a bit one dimensional (except of course during the love scenes and then he’s very watchable).
Taylor Schilling plays Beth well and so does Riley Thomas Stewart as her son Ben.
This movie is not bad—sure it won’t win any awards but it’s not an awful way to spend an evening. But, even with the Marine scenes, I don’t think guys will love it, so take a girlfriend and as a date movie, go see Men In Black, or better yet The Dark Knight Rises (the finale of the franchise), both in theatres in the near future.
Best line: “When you’ve lived long enough, you learn to appreciate the memories you have, and stop begrudging the ones you never got to make.”
This show starts out to be about fate and ends being about fate, and choices. I’ll leave you with two of my favourite quotes about fate. First a proverb.: “One meets his destiny often on the road he takes to avoid it.” And the second from Marcus Aurelius: “Everything that exists is in a manner, the seed of that which will be.”
It’s late and I’m waxing philosophical. Send me your favourite quote and I’ll try to use it.
I give The Lucky One 2 1/2 reels.
