Movie review: 'The Lucky Ones'

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2 stars (out of four)

A good film, one of a handful of dramatically viable and necessary features to emerge from America’s  war in Iraq, came out of the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.

Unfortunately it wasn’t “The Lucky Ones.” It was Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” scheduled for a 2009 release. “The Lucky Ones” is softer and more seriocomic, hewing to the genres of the  home-front picture and the road movie. Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena portray three  soldiers back in the States  from their respective tours of duty in Iraq. They meet on the plane home from Germany. Colee (McAdams) has a leg injury and an irrepressibly optimistic soul; her destination is Las Vegas, where she plans  to deliver the treasured guitar of her late boyfriend to the boyfriend’s parents. T.K. (Pena), also bound for the  West, is coping with a shrapnel wound  that has left him sexually dysfunctional, an issue he’d like to clear up before reuniting with his girlfriend.

The father figure is played by Robbins, eager to get back to his family and leave the Army for civilian life. Right away in “The Lucky Ones” you feel director and co-writer  Neil Burger struggling to arrange all the narrative furniture. Circumstances contrive to get these three to share a rental car from New York to St. Louis. Circumstances contrive to bring Colee, at a roadside tavern in Indiana, face-to-face with the meanest, most venal young women on the planet, who mock her injury, malign her service, and then powww!!!!! right on cue, she belts one of them in an awkwardly rabble-rousing moment.

Five seconds after Robbins’ character arrives home with his newfound pals, his unfeeling wife is telling him the marriage is over. And so it goes. Burger has made two very intriguing pictures  before “The Lucky Ones”: “Interview  With the Assassin” and “The Illusionist.” Toss “The Lucky Ones” in with those two, and you have three very different projects stylistically and narratively, united only by Burger’s facility with actors. While Robbins may be miscast (nothing in his demeanor or body language suggests any sort of military man) in the frequent, protracted scenes on the road, the actor works up a comfortable rhythm with his fellow performers. McAdams in particular, playing a kind of dream version of Lynndie  England, finds some intriguing nooks and crannies beneath her character’s sunny exterior.

But the film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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