(courtesy IMDb)
A protagonist with a heart of gold trapped in a world of dubious intention and darkly self-serving execution is a mainstay of storytelling; there’s something innately appealing about someone who has been exposed to the worst of humanity and yet somehow has emerged innocent and pure of heart, albeit somewhat sullied by the pragmatic to adapt and survive in the environment they inhabit.
The brilliance of Lucky, based on the popular novel by Marissa Stapley, rests heavily on how originally the series uses this well-worn trope, with the seven-episode run making it clear that while Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong (Anya Taylor-Joy) is far from being a babe in the woods, schooled in the world of grift and con artistry since she was a child by her emotionally negligent father John (Timothy Oliphant), she bitterly resents how it has shaped who she is and the life she leads.
That sense of slowly simmering betrayal is given time to grow and develop in Lucky, resulting not in some tirade-fuelled act of epic vengeance, though that is undoubtedly part of the story, but rather a Shakespearian level tragedy which somehow emerges with incipient hope in its tail.
As we meet Lucky, play with impressive subtlety and restraint by Anya-Joy, who somehow manages to plumb deeply operative levels of vulnerability and grief without once slipping into melodramatic parody, she has just woken up, literally as it turns out in her Las Vegas hotel suite, to the fact that her much-loved husband, Cary Masterson (Drew Starkey) has absconded while she sleep in drug-assisted slumber with their ten-million dollar haul from a recent daring robbery.
Fury inducing to a degree that might paralyse a lesser soul to pointless inaction, this act of stinging betrayal is made all the more terrible by the fact that the money had been skimmed by John while he was working for Cary’s mum Priscilla (Annette Bening), a calculatedly cold-blooded mob boss who has just emerged from a jail after an FBI sting masterminded by Agent Billie Rand (Aunjanua Ellis-Taylor) and who does not take kindly to the money’s disappearance.
Even less thrilled is Priscilla’s boss Wayne Whittaker (William Fichtner) who is somehow even more sadistic than his underling and who wants to kill Cary and Lucky in order to recover his looted funds (or really that of Priscilla who is the real mastermind behind what was a lucrative criminal enterprise involving the sale of illegally obtained wholesale amounts of oil).
Of course Priscilla can’t let him do that because she dotes on her resentful son to a wholly unhealthy degree and so she sets out to find both Lucky and Cary all while Agent Rand is pursuing them too in a series of near misses that is almost comical in its love and embrace of narrative convenience.
Almost It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in the way it repeatedly collides various characters, motivations and lives together, Lucky avoids becoming some sort of farcical race to whatever the hell the finish line is by focusing tightly and with affecting intent on the raw, broken humanity at the centre of the story.
At the heart of this singular focus is, of course, Lucky herself, someone who, if she had been left to her own devices, would likely have escaped the stranglehold of a noose of a life in which she finds herself, and escaped to something far more normal.
Normal is unfortunately something her scarred, driven by past trauma father who lives for the next hit, fix and con, doesn’t understand or want and it’s his love of going for the next huge break that drives him and Lucky to the brink of ruin and leaves the protagonist, who talks to her dad in his prison cell throughout the series, trying fix a mess not of her making.
It’s the titular character’s efforts in the show to find Cary, the money and to free herself and her father from the mess he has made that fuels Lucky but well beyond that the show examines what it’s like for someone who has only ever know deceit, emotional negligence and endless disappointment and pain to actually reach out for and hope for something better.
You wonder how someone who’s been through so much and known so little normalcy and emotional certainty could even think that such a state of hopeful being could be hers but Lucky does and it drives this propulsive and almost gothically intense series to some very interesting places indeed.
The tricky balancing act of Lucky is the way it is in many ways an outsized gangster chase film, with the forces of good and evil, both arrayed in fittingly ambiguous shades of grey, full of theatricality and overblown meaningful everything, a spirited approach which Bening in particular channels with menacingly threatening, quietly growling gusto, and yet, how it allows time to be deeply, movingly emotionally intimate.
This is a show that knows that while it wears blockbuster storytelling clothes which could somehow slide into amusing parody but which never does despite its narratively convenient storyline, that it is at heart the story of one woman caught between a slew of competing priorities and people, none of whom, not even her own father, have her best interests at heart.
Blind this to some extent, at least as far as her father is concerned, Lucky is all about her eyes are opened to the fact that things are, if it’s possible, somehow worse than she already thought they were.
And yet somehow, for all of the misery and emotional and physical pain visited on her, and Lucky does not go even remotely easy on her with fate treating her like some sort of multiple-scarred “whipping boy”, our much put-upon protagonist is afforded epiphanies aplenty and the time to to something concrete and life-changing with them in a show which could be, and in some ways is a swaggering blockbuster-level story of operatic battles between the better and lesser angels of humanity’s nature, and yet which emerges in the act of something wholly moving and desperately sad and yet ultimately driven by justice and hope which is probably the most remarkable thing of all.
Lucky stream on AppleTV.