Luck (2022)

Luck arrives as a workplace comedy about cosmic fortune, which is a premise that ought to be more fun than it turns out to be. Sam Greenfield is a young woman aging out of the foster system, and the film hands her a portal into the Land of Luck, a corporate bureaucracy staffed by leprechauns, dragons, and a German-accented unicorn. The casting is quietly varied, with Eva Noblezada, Whoopi Goldberg, Lil Rel Howery, and Suzy Nakamura filling roles the script never asks them to explain. This is representation as furniture: present, sturdy, unremarked upon. There is nothing wrong with furniture.

The film's progressive instincts are mild and mostly structural. A woman directs. A dragon voiced by Jane Fonda runs the company. A leprechaun voiced by Whoopi Goldberg runs security. Girl power, lightly applied, like a coat of paint on a house that was already standing. The Land of Luck does operate as a corporation, complete with a chief executive and a security division, and Babe's dream of a good-luck-only world earns a gentle rebuke. But the film has no interest in wealth or class. It has interest in balance, which is a cozier idea and demands nothing of anyone. The foster-care backdrop gestures toward social systems without ever naming a problem, and the movie lets that gesture sit there, unexamined, like a prop nobody bothered to move.

The third act stops the music to explain its theme out loud: people need the bad luck as much as the good. The lesson lands with the subtlety of a falling anvil, though it is delivered kindly, and the children in the audience will absorb it without complaint. What remains is a competently rendered, faintly derivative parable that has watched Inside Out and Monsters, Inc. and taken careful notes. It means well. It says so, repeatedly, and then it is over.