Lucky Luke (2009)

Lucky Luke is a 2009 French-Argentine Western comedy adapted from Morris's comic series, and it arrives with a ten-gallon hat and no ideological cargo. Jean Dujardin plays the fearless gunslinger sent by President Jameson to clean up Daisy Town, where a crooked gambler has taken root. The film has visual style to spare and a screenplay that received mixed notices, but its ambitions are modest: slapstick, shootouts, and a comic-book cowboy doing comic-book cowboy things. It is a lark with spurs.

The cast is uniformly white, and the film makes no comment on the fact. Female characters appear but advance no gender-conscious argument. The villain is a gambler, not a stand-in for capital. There is no LGBTQ+ material, no racial thesis, no climate anxiety, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent framing, no revisionist historical project. Daisy Town has saloons and dust and horses, not seminars. The film's cultural awareness is that of a Saturday morning cartoon with a budget for hats.

This is not a failure of moral seriousness. It is a failure to be interested. Lucky Luke preaches nothing, which in this ledger is a clean slate. The result is a harmless artifact, ideologically inert, and all the more restful for it. We leave the theater with no lessons, no corrected history, and no urge to organize a committee. Just a man, a horse, and a town that needs cleaning up. The classification is simple: a Western comedy that minds its own business.