Saturday, May 05, 2012

All the best movies end with a dance-off. Just look at my treatment for "Avatar II, Electric Boogaloo": (Movie Reviews For Movies I'll Never See)

In Movie Reviews For Movies I'll Never See, I watch the trailer and review what I expect the movie to be about.  This is the first-ever attempt at this.

Today: The Lucky One.



The Plot:  In The Lucky One, That Guy From High School Musical,  (who probably hates being called That Guy From High School Musical but what else has he done? Was he in Twilight? I think he was in Twilight) lies about his age and gets into the army, and is immediately sent to fight in the desert.  The war is an anonymous war that is there just to make sure you know that Guy, who is sensitive enough to notice pictures on the ground in the middle of a battlefield and also to therefore be many steps behind the rest of his fellow soldiers as they actually do their jobs, will have some major troubles to deal with.

To deal with those major troubles, Guy takes the picture of the woman he finds, and searches for the lighthouse she lives at.  All the best women live at lighthouses, even ones who appear to be 15 years older than the soldiers who stalk them.  Once Guy finds Older Woman, he is recognized as a Tool of Fate by Mischievous, Knowing Grandma, who sees something in Guy.

Guy then begins at his job washing dogs and eating jambalaya, which is a thing people in the movies cook, and things would be fine except for Cruel Dad, who with the help of Cruel Law Enforcement decides that the best possible way to show Older Woman he loves her is to scare her and rough up Guy, which serves only to make Guy sexier to Older Woman, who has had her eyes opened by domestic chores and not-at-all creepy lingering from Knowing Grandma.

In the end, and here I am making a supposition based on clues in the trailer, Guy and Cruel Dad have a dance off but Cruel Dad cheats by pepper-spraying Guy just prior to the competition.  Guy wins anyway when he remembers that the dog-bathing kit he always carries with him has a solution to neutralize pepper spray.  Guy gets carried off on the shoulders of the townsfolk and vows to fix the lighthouse and run it for the rest of his life.

REVIEW: I liked The Lucky One because at just over 2:30 it manages to keep its storyline moving and doesn't get bogged down in details like "Why doesn't Guy's beard ever grow any longer?" or "Why do Cruel Dads always have an in with the local police force?"  Also, the romance is very good in that it combines scenes of women washing dishes with scenes of women about to have sex in sparsely-furnished rooms, an erotic combination that is underutilized in "today's" "Hollywood."

I thought that the decision to use the Grandma from Meet The Parents was a daring choice, in that it hinted at something more beneath the surface of this trailer, and hopefully, in The Lucky One II we will see a return of Robert De Niro's character from that movie, and we can then all look forward to a Christmas, 2014 release of Lucky Focker Goes To War which will feature Ben Stiller's triumphant return to getting his privates hit with stuff and/or falling down.

2 comments:

stephen Hayes said...

If I had a dime for every beautiful girl I've met who lives in a lighthouse.... I'd decided to pass on this one because the trailer seemed rather vapid, but you've made me rethink my decision. I still have doubts....

Michael Offutt, Phantom Reader said...

His name is Zac Effron. How can you not know that?