Review of Lucky Break

Introduction

Here we go again… simplistic but laborious, irony-drained comedy/drama about an incompetent but charismatic criminal (played with strain by James Nesbitt) who endures his sentence, for some frankly baffling reason, by staging a musical about Admiral Nelson in order to arrange a not-so-elaborate escape with his stock quirky, peripheral sidekicks. Head Count: dapper toff Bill Nighy, his deranged pyromaniac cell-mate Raymond Waring, Nesbitt’s old partner in crime Lennie James and Timothy Spall, mumbling every sentence like he’s addressing a puppy with broken paws, as the harassed nice guy with a small kid who you just know is going to have his heart-of-gold martyred in the name of conveniently placed Act 2 pathos. Do this sorry arrangement of nice-guy crims make it over the prison walls? Or will Nesbitt’s relationship with cozy psychiatrist Olivia Williams make him think twice? Whatever the outcome I can assure you, you’ll care even less than I do.

Video

Nothing really to complain about, although I did detect a few compression signs here and there. The promise of anamorphic 2.35 belies Director Peter Cattaneo’s drably realist style, with the prison’s gray walls offering little in the way of visual fireworks.

Audio

Again, this is reasonable enough. Being a dialogue driven film there is little for the 5.1 track to do… and it does it well. It should be noted however, that the score is deliriously annoying, sounding like elevator musak played up to 11 by UB40.

Features

I really shouldn’t say this, because we need to encourage filmmakers to put care and attention into making worthwhile DVD supplements, but in this case, they really shouldn’t have bothered: tiresome, brown-nosing featurette followed by pointless ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage and equally coma-inducing interviews with primary cast and crew. Needless to say, stock comments are repeated ad nauseum throughout, which we can only assume goes for the audio commentary with Nesbitt and Cattaneo, as due to poor recording it’s almost impossible to hear anything the latter says. Topping it all off are the film’s frankly appalling trailers and some promos for other FilmFour discs and we have the perfect model of how not to do special features, even for flop movies… see, there’s a silver lining in ever cloud.

Conclusion

As with his last film ‘The Full Monty’, director Peter Cattaneo seems desperate to squeeze every drop of joy out of even the most blissfully absurd concept. The actors seem to be awaiting the day they cash their paychecks and thus treat their performances with due disinterest. And whereas one can forgive Nesbitt for stumbling in his first big-screen lead, Plummer and Spall seem positively exhausted by even the prospect of standing up on cue. The plot’s spin on ‘The Great Escape’ is amusing enough, so why does Cattaneo treat the jovial premise with such leaden bathetic desolation? For the most part, ‘Lucky Break’ seems more like a movie set on death-row than a film about cheeky-chappies dressing up in stupid costumes and longing for escape. The characters seem to possess a greater longing to be relieved of the misery of life than they do the mundanity of imprisonment.

Even if we pass off Cattaneo`s pathological joylessness on an obsession with the dour, middle-class perception of ‘the other half’, it seems strange that a film about the very act of escapism should seem so entirely uninterested in the matter. An airless, schematic treatment of the love-story seems to suggest that even if Cattaneo tells us he’s making a bittersweet slice of escapism, he’s really making a leery, clinical film about emotions (friendship, duty, love, desire for freedom etc.) that is totally incapable of inhabiting or transmitting any of them on their own level.

While it remains slightly more focused than the ramshackle debacle he turned into Britain’s most successful ever film, this still feels like the usual har-har kitchen-sink sentimentality, only apparently filmed in the suffocating eternity of outer space. Menial, pointless and vacuum-sucked of humanity, Cattaneo can at least be assured that his film has achieved one thing: that watching it may indeed be exactly what it feels like to do time, so much so that perhaps the Home Office should consider screenings as an alternative to serving prison terms.