Roger Avary

(On Cable TV, April 2020) While it’s far too early to call curtains on writer-director Roger Avary’s career, the first quarter-century of it has shown a filmmaker with interesting ideas that couldn’t quite get them properly expressed… and that’s in addition to a tumultuous personal life that saw him go to prison for vehicular manslaughter under the influence. Somewhat on-the-nose, his first film after his prison sentence is Lucky Day, which begins with the protagonist… getting out of prison. Said to be a belated sequel to Killing Zoe, the film quickly becomes its own thing—an action-comedy very much in the style of the 1990s wave of black criminal comedies that Avary himself pioneered by co-writing Pulp Fiction. The film is directed with some stylish glee, and Crispin Glover’s delightfully unhinged performance as a fake-French assassin can go a long way in sustaining interest in the film. But as much as my fondness for Tarantinoesque (or should that be Avaryesque?) black crime comedies grows stronger now that they’re not making nearly as many of them as they used to, even I felt that Lucky Day quickly became annoying. It certainly does itself no favour through its constant excessive violence against innocent characters, starting with a cute supporting actress shoved aside for the sake of a bad joke. But it gets worse moments later with cheap CGI gore, and again later, as what could have been a good action showcase in an art gallery becomes a repulsively violent sequence. Coupled with the film’s cartoonish humour, it demonstrates an immaturity and an inability to keep a consistent tone. If you’re looking for the ways in which Lucky Day is a clear step down from Pulp Fiction, it’s this kind of juvenile insistence than an R-rating is inherently better than more broadly accessible fare: you can be funny and rough and dark without disgusting audiences. Glover’s performance is pretty good (it had been a while since we’d seen him in this much crazy glory) but the rest of Lucky Day is dull when it’s not actively repulsive. This being a Canada-France co-production may explain the unusually high amount of French dialogue (most of it obviously not spoken by native or fluent speakers).