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Good Luck
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by Allumination
Sales Rank: 26151
Price: $9.98
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<I>Good Luck</I>--which played the 1997 film festival circuit under the unwieldy title <I>The Ox and the Eye</I>--is a casebook example of good intentions getting in the way of good filmmaking. This is one of those eager-to-please movies that works well on the surface while perpetuating a stereotypical (and therefore condescending) perception of the disabled. The story is strictly movie-of-the-week fodder, involving the odd-couple pairing of a former football star (Vincent D'Onofrio) who was blinded in a freak tackling accident, and a paraplegic (Gregory Hines) who dreams of entering a popular white-water rafting competition on Oregon's Rogue River. <p> Hines convinces the bull-headed D'Onofrio to join him in the competition, defying all those bumpkin nonbelievers who doubt that two "cripples" can pilot a river raft, and <I>Good Luck</I> settles into its predictable feel-good plotting. The movie is most enjoyable when Hines and D'Onofrio simply play off of each other's considerable talents, and humorous dialogue enables them to give engaging performances (although we could do without the gratuitous profanity and D'Onofrio's gleeful description of a prodigious bowel movement). The problem with this movie is that it avoids depth at every turn, favoring triumph-over-adversity clichés and offering nothing new (or particularly authentic) in its handling of the physical and emotional issues of blindness and paralysis. The direction varies from adequate to amateurish, and by the time the movie indulges an obligatory ending that's pregnant with saccharine uplift, only the most gullible viewer will be suckered into feeling good. <I>--Jeff Shannon</I>
Viewer Reviews
I think I can safely say this movie is one of the best purchases I have made all year. After waiting for over three months for Amazon to finally tell me they could not obtain stock, and thinking I had missed out (trying to get hold of Vincent D'Onofrio films in Australia is next to impossible), I found a seller in the Amazon Marketplace selling a used copy for $5. I snapped it up, and I wasn't disappointed.
I won't go into the details of the film, as that has already been outlined. But this movie was immensely enjoyable. It wasn't a 'we will conquer all' film in the typical sense of the word (think any Hollywood sporting flick where the underdog makes a comeback and wins against all odds). It was, however, a feel-good flick in the sense that the two main characters attain achievements that no one else thought they could manage.
There's plenty of humour through the movie, and it has its crude moments, but they can be overlooked in the grand scheme of the entire movie. The entire film was simple, but fantastic, and much less of a cliche than I expected it to be.
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Good Luck
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