Hard Luck (2006)
Title: Hard Luck
Year: 2006
Genre: Crime / Drama / Thriller
Directed: Mario Van Peebles
Cast: Wesley Snipes,Gavin J. Behrman,Cybill Shepherd,Jackie Quinones...
Review: "Luck ain't nothin' but karma in work clothes," says an ex-con and small-time hood known to everyone as Lucky. That sounds like another karma-conscious bottom-feeder named Earl, but with flashier clothes and jewelry. And swagger. Like his TV counterpart, this direct-to-DVD anti-hero wants to go straight. The thing is, when you have connections like he does and everybody recognizes you as a former "playa," that's not the easiest thing to do.
That's the starting point for "Hard Luck," which stars Wesley Snipes as the main character. This Mario Van Peebles ("Baadassss!") directed film follows Lucky as he gets roped into going to a birthday party for a mob boss he used to "play" with, and it turns out to have been a set-up involving dirty cops, dirty money, and a dirty escape. When Lucky commandeers the flashy mustang owned by one of the club's pole dancers and drags her along for the ride, with the cash, it leads them all the way to another genre: the slasher picture.
Really, though, that's about the only thing that's interesting in this otherwise paint-by-numbers film that offers nothing new and nothing much that comes close to the unexpected. The thumping theme music is here, the flying bullets, the macho posturing, the stereotypic gay-in-power, mob boss, bad cops, and stooges, the stripper who's "not easy," and the obligatory skin shots from that pole dancer named Angela (Jackie Quinones).
What makes the film interesting is also what makes the film silly. Cybill Shepherd and James Liao play a pair of psycho lovers who get turned on mostly when they capture a woman or a couple and take her/them back to their lake retreat, where they strip them down and play games that seem like a cross between a virtual reality music video and a Nazi scientist's experiments. "Hard Luck" is rated R for violence, sexual content, language, and aberrant behavior—the latter because of these goofy fetishists. But the interesting thing is that just when Lucky thinks his life couldn't take a turn for the worst, he and the pole dancer end up in an isolated cabin with a broken down car just like a couple of hapless teens in a slasher picture.
"Hard Luck" has the sheen of a low-budget film, with a kind of plasticity that coats everything and an over-reliance on gimmicks like colored lights and briefly sped-up sequences. There's not much to say about it except that you've seen it before at least a hundred times, if it weren't for that kinky crossover into another genre.
