For a very long time, I considered the writer-director Rod Lurie as an attention-grabbing and impressive creator of topical drama — hot-button political movies like “Deterrence” (1999) and “The Contender” (2000), the trenchant Valerie Plame muckraker “Nothing but the Truth” (2008), the misfired remake of “Straw Dogs” (2011). However Lurie, it’s truthful to say, now has two filmmaking identities. There’s the middlebrow dramatist, and there’s the director of hot-wire fight spectacle who first emerged, in 2019, with “The Outpost,” an Afghanistan Warfare drama that was certainly one of most riveting and genuine films concerning the expertise of conflict within the post-9/11 world. Lurie is a U.S. Military veteran, and “The Outpost” introduced him to a brand new peak as a filmmaker.
So once I realized that his new film, “Lucky Strike,” is a fight thriller set throughout World Warfare II, I used to be primed for extra of the new Rod Lurie (and, in actual fact, he has even tweaked his title, now billing himself as Rod Davis Lurie). For some time, “Lucky Strike” appears like a movie by the director of “The Outpost.” Scott Eastwood, along with his chiseled, thin-lipped echo of his father’s squinty mystique (although Scott is sort of a extra affable model of Clint), performs Capt. Citadel, a soldier who was eligible for a deferment — on account of his stateside work as an engineer — however enlisted anyway. It’s December 1944, within the Ardennes forest in Belgium (a pivot-point battle locale throughout WWII), and Citadel is ordered to steer half a dozen of his males to a vacation spot a number of hours away from base camp, the place they’re to dam a key highway with explosives. They’re driving a defective truck, which they’re compelled to desert, and after reaching the locale on foot they start the job of booby-trapping it.
The movie lulls us into desirous to see them succeed. However they’re surrounded by Nazis, and earlier than lengthy a sniper begins selecting the boys off. Lurie phases all of this with fraught existential command. Even the pictures glimpsed by way of binoculars are finished with originality — not the usual cardboard-cutout factor however waxy, thick-glassed photographs that counsel a world of motion out of attain. Citadel figures out the place the sniper hearth is coming from, and as he and one other soldier crawl up the woodsy hill from the highway, they spot a bunker, the place there are two German troopers. A strategically tossed grenade places an finish to them (or so it appears), however Citadel’s squad is decimated, and he’s been shot within the thigh. Can he make it the 30 kilometers to the rally port at Elsenborn?
“Lucky Strike” is now a distinct movie from the one we thought we have been watching. However there are two dimensions that make it a lesser movie. A part of Lurie’s energy as a director of fight cinema is the way in which he captures the quick, spiky, shit-talking camaraderie of troopers; he’s obtained a sixth sense for it. However as soon as Citadel is on his personal, that high quality leaks out of the film. And since Eastwood, who’s an excellent actor, does certainly carry a mythic echo of his father, the casting lets us know one thing: that he’s in all probability not going to be fragged within the subsequent hour. That sort of tamps down the suspense.
“Lucky Strike” isn’t a uncooked fight drama a lot as a lone-wolf style movie, one thing that feels tidier and possibly safer. Lurie phases it with talent; it’s not like what occurs is predictable. But it surely’s not enthralling both. Citadel consistently has to improvise, as when he strangles a soldier with a cellphone wire, or when he’s given shelter at a farmhouse by a Belgian lady and her daughter, solely to have a posse of German troopers present up. He hides himself within the cellar, however when the youthful lady is threatened, he can’t assist himself — he bursts out and begins firing. At one level he takes over a German tank, drives it off a cliff, then can’t get out. He impersonates a lifeless soldier within the highway (a Nazi pees on his helmet), then realizes that the corpse subsequent to him is alive, which might blow his cowl. He’s in hell with no rule e-book.
The film’s melodramatic timpani rating is efficient, even when it appears like a Nineteen Fifties contact. So does the reference made by the movie’s title — the truth that the American troopers think about it good luck to at all times burn by way of the brand of a Fortunate Strike cigarette. But watching “Lucky Strike,” I stored questioning: Why did Rod Lurie make this film? The drama of a solo hero-survivor negotiating the ultimate days of World Warfare II doesn’t precisely really feel linked to our world. And when the film lastly does make its plea for relevance, which hinges on the life-saving significance of Citadel’s radio, it appears to come back out of one other movie solely — specifically, “Hidden Figures” (2016), with its homage to the variety of unsung scientists. “Lucky Strike” presents Lurie the war-film director in miniature, and there’s no disgrace in that. However what the movie suggests is that he shouldn’t be shying away from the fight maximalist inside him.
