Big Screen Peter: The Lucky One

The Lucky One, a new movie staring Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling, is taken from a Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. It recounts the tale of a Logan Thibault, a Marine sergeant who survives his last tour serving in Iraq because a glint of sun catches his eye in a rubble pile.

Intrigued, Logan stands and walks toward the pile to find a photo of a beautiful girl posed in front of a unique lighthouse. A mortar explodes in the exact spot he had been sitting. The blast killed three Marines but, because Logan walked a few dozen feet to pick up this alluring picture, he survives. And becomes obsessed with the picture.

How do we know of this obsession? Cue montage of Logan asking four people.

That obsession is the only tangible thread found in The Lucky One.

No, not the quest for the girl, but the undying obsession with portraying emotions with a montage roll. The movie is just one long montage. There is no probing character portrayal. Dialogue only exists as a conduit toward another montage reel.

Don't get me wrong, the tool can be useful. But it's like stating a bottle of beer can be refreshing then drinking an entire case. And this overkill turns the lead characters of Logan and Beth into empty robots. They have no room to emote, no reason to even try.

The director, in filling the movie with these montages, is trying to do the actor's job for them.

Yet this quibble gives the impression that the movie was possibly salvageable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Lucky One is PG-13 lady porn. It pits a hunky, saint of a man against the backdrop of single motherhood, leaving him without much in the way of character so he becomes an easy mark for audience projection. Ahab had his white whale. American women, thanks to Nicholas Sparks, have the empty white male. The sexy male automaton is a ripe canvas on which to project desires.

And Efron gives us plenty of rippling real estate for those sensual projections.

Logan is somehow able to find the lighthouse and subsequently the girl, Beth, in rural Louisiana. Well, at least Hollywood's conception of rural Louisiana. Somehow the second poorest state in the nation lacks any semblance of poverty or hardship, and instead ends up looking like a rural utopia.

However, perhaps in a fit of southern authenticity, Beth happens to come with a pre-fab family. One that Logan slides right into over a series of, you guessed it, montages.

Over the course of the movie we're given an array of simplistic narratives — He fixes things!  Awww, he is good with kids! He stands up to bullies! Animals love him! —which do nothing but degrade the movie ever further.

It's an easy, obvious story, the cinematic equivalent of Stevie Wonder's “I Just Called (To Say I Love You).”

Which is to say, sentimental tacky crap. Buh-bye.