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Take a slew of
the best character actors from the Mafia Actor’s Guild, include a New
York setting, and involve a plot you’ve probably seen a thousand times
before and you get “Lucky Man.” Or as it should be called: “Italian
Stereotypes: the Movie.” I don’t begrudge director Ruvin Orbach for
trying to create a tale of moral struggles, but “Lucky Man” is so filled
with endless cheesy Italian stereotypes with all the obvious players
that I had a hard time sitting through the entire half hour. “Lucky Man”
is so wrought with endless streams of Italian movie clichés, that I just
couldn’t take it seriously. There’s the goomba young ne’er dowell
brother, the older brother who chose to be a priest, the craps players
who argue back and forth, the mafia boss who talks to his second hand
man who giggles in response, the cafe doubling as a lair for mob boss
Paulie, and there’s even a scene where a bunch of obese mob bosses are
sitting around a table with an Italian dinner yelling at each other and
at the local help. And to boot there are names like Paulie, Tony, Jimmy,
Sal, Frankie, Ciro, and all the other classic Italian tags you can fit
to any mafia based action drama ever made.
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“Lucky Man”
is a losing battle from the start with characters much too
familiar to be deemed original, and situations rehashed ten
times over from better films like “A Bronx Tale,” and
“Goodfellas” (mercifully) sans the self-indulgent narration.
Everything about “Lucky Man” is predictable ho-hum cliché
stereotypical mafia fare and I just couldn’t get over how
painstakingly blatant the similarities to other films “Lucky
Man” possesses, and how director Orbach is more concerned
with mimicking that atmosphere instead of giving us an
original story. |
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Rather, we get a
cheesy religious themed conflict story about a Priest brother protecting
his thuggish brother and is forced to decide if he must kill him after
the schmuck gambles away money that will pay off his debts to local mob
boss Paulie. Orbach doesn’t even try for originality, and though the
photography is no slouch, “Lucky Man” is nothing more than a rehash of a
rehash of a rehash of a trite sub-plot to a better gangster movie you’ve
probably seen before, with weak performances, and obligatory walk-ons
from great Italian actors for the sake of credibility. I wish I could
have loved this, but I was just floored at the endless derivations that
Orbach settles for instead of originality.
There's not much to say that I haven't already. "Lucky Man" plays like
an homage to bad Italian stereotypes that we've seen a thousand times in
much better films. All you need a scene involving stickball, a rant
about the Dodgers, a cantankerous Italian grandma, and you have yourself
a reference guide for Italian movie cliches.
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