The Lucky Ones.

"Three wounded US soldiers in The Lucky Ones, all traveling 'home' from Iraq, played by Michael Peña, Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins, have almost nothing in common with one another except for their war service, yet they wind up getting entangled with one another for practical as well as existential reasons, sharing a rented car," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Such a story (which [Neil] Burger coscripted with Dirk Wittenborn) easily could have slid into some form of sentimentality. But this never happens because the three lead characters keep surprising us - both in their lack of power and in the various ways they can bring limited empowerment to one another."

Updated through 9/26.

"Saying The Lucky Ones is the best film about Iraq yet is the proverbial damning with faint praise," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "It's a 'well-made' film: Explosive emotional confrontations are deferred, the ending is purposefully unresolved, the camera-work deliberately unshowy. Thank goodness for all that - and the fact that a hashed-over war debate gets less time than one character's ED problem - but it's finally all too familiar."

"Sometimes... empty, contrived fantasies are just empty, contrived fantasies, as is certainly the case with this embarrassingly phony cross between Grace Is Gone, Home of the Brave and - believe it or not - Twister," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"[D]espite its screenwriting contrivances (there's even a third-act hurricane), despite the predictability of its tonal shifts from comic to dramatic, despite director/co-writer Neil Burger's refusal to take any political stance on the war - despite all that, despite even the hurricane and the jaunty score and the scene where Robbins locks the keys in the car, it's actually pretty watchable," writes Paul Matwychuk.

"What elevates The Lucky Ones is a trio of memorable performances," finds Louis Peitzman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Capone talks with Burger for AICN.

Updates, 9/26: "Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its Platoon or its Full Metal Jacket, but for now, we'll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment - at least, from a fiction film (documentaries are, happily, another story)." Chris Wisniewski, indieWIRE: "Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones makes no effort to fill that void. Instead, it seems calculated to correct another, related problem: the anemic box-office of Iraq-themed films."

"Whether Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones will break the jinx is anyone's guess, but as a story it's more convincing and substantial than Stop-Loss or Home of the Brave," argues JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

More from Robert Davis (Daily Plastic), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Ben Kenigsberg (Time Out New York), Laura Kern (New York Times), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

Sean Axmaker talks with Robbins for the Parallax View.

Glenn Kenny finds it "a lovely, engaging piece that's best appreciated as a road movie/fable, because that's really what it is."

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2008 6:58 AM