Review: Lucky

Get him out of here.

It’s not easy being Irish. I can tell you first hand, there’s nothing easy about having see-through skin during the peak of summer during beach season near the Jersey Shore. We burn, we eat corned beef, and we’re gingers. For  Happy McSweeney, his not having any luck comes as a result of some asshole dragon stealing his treasure. Fed up with being unlucky his whole life, he decides to take part in a journey with his friends to get his treasure back which they surmise is under the control of some crazy guy named Houlihan.

Yes, I know, the premise makes zero sense, and the plot is even more bizarre. Worst yet, it’s a LONG hour saved only by the fact that the voice performances were exceptional. Which is good because if you’re gonna deliver a heavily inspired Ocean’s Eleven meets Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer with a splash of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you’re gonna need a solid cast to help get us through. Led by Ben 10’s Gunnar Sizemore, our hero character Happy McSweeney comes across as very much a Winnie the Pooh-esque clumsy character which really is just one of a number of cliched characters that we’re presented with. Ron Funches checks in as a big oaf named “Sammy” who really is just a Shrek rip off just without the accent.  The cast gets more bizarre with the addition of an elf named “Shannon” voiced by Kira Kosarin and a gremlin named “Reggie”. Confused yet? I know I am. Why the hell we have elves and gremlins in a movie supposedly focused on a tale for St. Patrick’s Day I’ll never know. In fact, I think even the producers of this movie were confused. Did you know this movie was literally called Lucky the Leprechaun for weeks but they changed the titled to Lucky after network executives were confused as to the lead character’s name, as in like, “Is the leprechaun’s name “Lucky” or “Happy”, the latter of which is even more bizarre due to the fact that the character’s depressed about not being lucky. Mark Hamill offers essentially a shade off of what is his typical voice for “The Joker” in his role as “Houlihan”, a servicable if not yet another cliched piece of the puzzle.

There are some entertaining sequences, the aforementioned influence of Ocean’s Eleven comes in the form of the plan that’s laid out in trying to break into Houlihan’s, no not the restaurant just the dude’s house, so as to get back Happy’s gold. It’s a big house, so we spend a lot of time in it before we get to the not so surprising connection between Houlihan and the dragon and initially took Happy’s gold, to begin with. I’ll let you sort it out. Because despite sharp production and a decent cast, everything about the plot and premise is unnerving ad devoid of any luck at all. Worst yet, we’re still waiting for the fucking Rocko’s Modern Life movie in exchange for this.