Lucky Is Trying to Con You

Picture Anya Taylor-Joy’s face in your mind. Those gigantic eyes and sharp cheekbones have a surreal quality that’s served her well in all sorts of genre pictures and period pieces; of course she’s a space princess in December’s Dune: Part Three and a woodland elf in the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. We’re used to seeing this face in expressions of intense focus, as a witch, a sorceress, or an apocalyptic warrior, individuals defined by a singular goal and otherworldly spookiness. But when asked to convey human-woman concerns, like a shitty dad, a shitty husband, and a shitty mother-in-law, that intense gaze can become inscrutable, even incomprehensible — a closed door to her interiority instead of a way in. That is the extent to which Apple TV’s crime-thriller series Lucky uses Taylor-Joy, who gives a surface-level performance in a surface-level show, one that overloads forward momentum in lieu of character depth.

Lucky continues Apple TV’s recent spate of series centering women caught between a rock and a hard place, unsure of what threats might be lurking around the corner and desperately determined to survive. Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company helped kick-start this trend, and nearly a decade after Big Little Lies, the TV landscape is now littered with offerings like Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, stories anchored by always-overburdened, often-clever women and fluid in their approach to genre. Lucky has the former in Taylor-Joy’s titular woman but not the latter; this series sticks so stubbornly to being a crime drama full of people with mommy and daddy issues that it leaves all kinds of nuance on the table. Lucky is a con woman, and Lucky is trying to trick us into believing that its tepid direction, skimpy character development, and perfunctory feminism add up to something more profound than an overly stretched book adaptation. We’re the marks.

Another entry in Witherspoon’s Reese’s Book Club–to–TV–series pipeline, Lucky is “based on” Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel pretty much in name only. Four of the book’s main players are present: 20-something Lucky; her imprisoned father, John (Timothy Olyphant); John’s dangerous ex-partner in money laundering, Priscilla (Annette Bening); and Priscilla’s son and Lucky’s husband, Cary (Drew Starkey). But significant portions of their backstories and present-day motivations — in addition to most of the novel’s narrative — have been replaced by creator Jonathan Tropper and co-showrunner Cassie Pappas. (Witherspoon and Taylor-Joy are also executive producers.) The seven-episode season, which premieres today with two episodes, kicks off with a betrayal: Lucky and Cary have secured for themselves $10 million in stolen money that will fund a new life outside the United States, but after a night of partying in Las Vegas, Lucky wakes up to find Cary and the cash gone. Lucky’s and Cary’s faces are on the news, and FBI agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who had previously grappled with John and Priscilla, is now after their kids. The young couple’s millions were accrued as part of a “mob-related biodiesel scheme” — a prime example of Lucky’s clunky exposition — and Rand is intent on getting back taxpayer dollars and getting one over on the scammers who have irked her for years.

This has all the makings of either a fleet-footed story that zips between set pieces and cons or an inward-looking character study that slows down long enough to interrogate how Lucky got herself into this mess. Lucky tries to be both and doesn’t quite nail either. Its pacing is rapid and its execution artless. In the continued Netflixication of television, there are flashbacks to scenes that went down just a few minutes ago, a choice meant to reflect how Lucky keeps obsessing over what Cary did to her and wondering which clues she missed, but those montages feel mostly like clumsy recaps for second-screen viewers. The entirety of Lucky and Cary’s romance is slow-motion memories of them embracing in season premiere “No Shortcuts,” while the years they spent together before this dissolution are mostly unaddressed. Cary’s absence is meant to be a major moment in Lucky’s bildungsroman actualization, the odyssey that Fiona Apple, contributing a song to the opening credits, wails about with the lines, “Who is the one I’m gonna make proud? And is it too late for it to be me?” But Lucky standing alone is only meaningful if we understand who used to stand by her side, and it doesn’t help that Taylor-Joy and Starkey have so little dialogue together that their vibe never becomes as sexual, or as affectionate, as it needs to be.

Taylor-Joy’s Lucky is more effectively thorny and aggrieved when paired with Olyphant, feeding his Raylan Givens persona through a wide-smiling-scumbag filter. Congratulations to everyone who wondered if Olyphant still has Go in him; he does. The confrontation between father and daughter, in which Taylor-Joy unloads Lucky’s resentments about growing up in the life, is one of the season’s most barbed moments. But all of Olyphant’s grinning charm can’t counter a script that has him speak mostly in criminal-underworld aphorisms. The same goes for Bening and her syncopated line deliveries and the always-welcome, always-swaggy Clifton Collins Jr., playing her bodyguard Dutch. The two exude enough casual menace to feel at home in a story about the mob, but no matter how much stank Collins puts on a line like “How can someone so small cause so much trouble?,” he can’t turn it away from cliché.

The script’s blandness could maybe be forgiven if Lucky at least looked engaging, but there, too, it feels flat. Lucky’s initial escape through a casino floor is shot predominantly in midrange close-ups, with no experimentation in building tension through unexpected compositions or cuts. Throw the camera overhead, you know? Alas. A car crash in the desert starts out promisingly claustrophobic, but when it transitions into a fight scene outside, it’s lit with the same overused tone of fuchsia pink that must tire even early adopter Nicolas Winding Refn. A midseason chase scene that ends in devastating injuries never has the real-world desperation of a street race. It’s like everything about Lucky is occurring in a vacuum, one where her choices and the world that’s affected by them never quite sync up.

In an unexpected parallel to Euphoria’s final season, cast member Alanna Ubach here plays Sylvia, a woman who moved her granddaughters out to the desert to avoid society’s corrupting, often misogynistic, influence. Of course Lucky manipulates her for help, and Lucky’s devastation when she realizes that she’s unintentionally separated the girls from their favorite toy is the sort of reflective moment the series needs more of to give its protagonist a fuller sense of self. How does Lucky feel about recurrently using a battered-woman excuse to gain sympathy from unsuspecting targets like Sylvia? What drives her attempt to use female solidarity as a way to ingratiate herself with Priscilla, a woman who is seemingly her enemy? Is Lucky cynical, or is she just, sigh, who her father made her?

The series digs into some of this with a too-brief scene where Lucky shares a drowning nightmare that is identical to Neil McCauley’s dream about not having enough time in Heat, but all this reference to Michael Mann’s masterpiece does is reflect how underexplored Lucky is as a character. To what degree does she compartmentalize her crimes, and how much shame inadvertently leaks through? Stapley’s novel used an adoption story line and a $390 million–winning lottery ticket as morality tests for her ensemble, but Tropper and Pappas’s adaptation loses both of those, and it’s unclear why. The book isn’t highbrow literature, but it is meticulous in mapping out how seemingly minuscule choices ripple through time to make us better or worse versions of ourselves. It built more than a diorama and made its protagonist more than a paper doll. With the TV version, there’s no such luck.