
“Your Lucky Day” is a somewhat hackneyed B-movie about the violence that a big lottery ticket unleashes in a small New York convenience store.
It stumbles into its inciting incident and drifts through some pitiless and bloody violence before taking a turn towards modestly interesting as the characters settle into “We need to think this over/What’s our story?”
IAnd it’s notable for being the final film of promising young actor Angus Cloud, who died of an overdose this past summer. The “Euphoria” actor’s final film is a solid piece of work and a sad coda to a life and career cut short by his own misadventures.
Cloud plays Sterling, a street dealer soft enough to get himself mugged by a couple of bougie teens — he won’t pull the trigger to stop them — but who makes the rash decision to rob a well-heeled racist (Spencer Garrett) who’s celebrated his “Mega Ball” winning ticket a little too loudly in the bodega.
That endangers the bluff, blowhard winner, the store owner (Mousa Hussein Kraish), the ice-cream eating pregnant couple (Jessica Garza and Elliot Knight) and the cop (Sterling Beauman) who just stopped by to use the bathroom.
One shootout later, there’s a dead victim, a “cop down,” and a lot of working-the-problem to do for our impulsive, armed idiot and the three people he has under a gun and making him wonder “What’s your story” going to be?
Writer-director Dan Brown, expanding a “comic” short film of the same title that he made over a dozen years ago, trots out tropes and complications of the most cynical and even sinister variety here. Human nature and human decency are tested. We’re a long way from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” so lower those expectations for “noble” character behavior.
The action is well-staged, shot and edited, and the acting is uniformly good. But the plotting is somewhat eye-rolling and the pacing uncertain and slow. There are characters, agendas, bursts of violence and a somewhat overreaching “add characters for the third act” that has to be shoved into 88 or so minutes, and it isn’t handled all that gracefully.
It’d be great to be able to say that young Angus Cloud’s final, ironically-titled film underscores the tragedy of his untimely death. But irony or not, the mixed bag that is “Your Lucky Day” just isn’t good enough to use as an epitaph.
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Angus Cloud, Jessica Garza, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Elliot Knight, Sterling Beauman, Jason O’Mara and Spencer Garrett
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Brown. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:29

