Movie Details
Movie: Luckiest Girl Alive (2022)
Director: Mike Barker
Cast: Mila Kunis, Chiara Aurelia, and Finn Wittrock
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Release date: 30 September 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.4/10
Language: English and Spanish
Duration: 1h 55m
Trailer
Synopsis
I watched it a while ago, so I can safely start this review by saying, “What the hell did I just see?”Luckiest Girl Alive is a new movie from Netflix that will probably be haunting the top spot in the most-watched title category for a few days now. Don’t be mistaken though. The same song is repeated over and over again.
Once again, we got a movie that looks far more like a fast food product than anything else. However, since this is an adaptation of a well-known book starring Mila Kunis, there is a chance that someone’s significant other could choose it as a movie for Netflix & chill on Saturday. In that case, let me briefly describe what roughly awaits you, and then recommend that you take the initiative as soon as possible and go into the “chill” phase.
The film tells the story of the journalist Ani (Tiffany for short), who lives in New York, has a fairytale wedding to a fairytale man, and in addition to sometimes imagining how she murders her partner, she also speaks a lot and often to the viewer as a narrator. At first glance, it seems like the beginning of a B-thriller, where one of the two will soon really want to kill the other. But as readers of the manuscript well know, I was completely off the mark with this expectation.
The film soon takes a completely different turn, instead returning with flashbacks to Ana’s youth, when she was the victim of a gang rape that later resulted in a school shooting that killed most of her bullies. However, we still follow the adult Ani as she fulfills her dream and receives an offer to write for The New York Times, prepares to get married, and watches with great distaste how the last surviving bully, who was left chained to a wheelchair after a fatal school massacre, became a lawyer for a gun ban. Such a bitter irony of fate, one would like to say. In short, there’s a lot there, but the author of the book and at the same time the screenplay, Jessica Knoll, doesn’t even succeed in unpacking those things into some meaningful conclusion and message.
The film would very much like to be another Gone, but it is more reminiscent of an order of magnitude worse The Girl on the Train, while it is at least an order of magnitude worse than that. The distilled pursuit of #MeToo drama here vanishes under a layer of meaningless interactions, mediocre acting performances led by Kunis, and the soporific direction of Mike Barker, who may have celebrated success on TV, but here he presented himself as a pure routiner who lacks juice and ideas.
Not only does Luckiest Girl Alive feel like it came about 5-6 years too late, but I’d call it outright the worst contribution to this modest, if quite essential, subgenre of thriller dramas. I’ll give one example where I came close to splashing water right on the TV (I just missed the water). The main character has just published a major article in which she describes her difficulties and her trauma, and the filmmakers had the balls to shoot a scene where, while riding the subway in the same carriage, the article is read by almost all the women present, and of them 3 (!) on the very wagon, they begin to describe their own experiences via voiceover and thank the author of the article for her courage and reading the reactions on her phone.
However, more or less the entire finale of the film is filmed similarly, so in the last ten minutes one has to either brace oneself a lot or, on the contrary, resign one’s faith in humanity and hope that it will end as soon as possible. And still, the 115 minutes felt endless. In the end, this patchwork doesn’t even reach that average. So if your partner or other literary enthusiast with dubious taste will force you to do it, try to suggest to them the opposite of Fincher’s Gone Girl excellently balanced beater, or let them go through this desperately unfunny and uninteresting hell on their own.
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