Seventy-one thousand war films have been made. Make that seventy-one thousand and one, with the addition of this Lucky Strike film review. The majority concern World War II, a conflict close enough in history to keep reminding us that genuine, unadulterated evil is not fiction. Hitler’s Nazi regime did not hide what it was doing to Jews, Roma, and other population groups across Europe. It did it in plain sight. Rod Lurie’s Lucky Strike finds a fresh angle on that world, and it is one of the better WWII films in recent memory.
Director Rod Lurie brings something genuinely new to this well-worn territory.
About Rod Lurie
Lurie is a West Point graduate whose films are consistently weighty, political, and important. His credits include The Outpost, about the Taliban in Afghanistan; Deterrence, on the burden of the US presidency; and The Contender, in which a woman dares to run for Vice President. He has drawn Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Joan Allen, Orlando Bloom, and Scott Eastwood to his projects. It makes complete sense. Lurie understands the power of political, military, and strategic storytelling at the extreme end of human experience.
Lucky Strike is co-written, co-directed, and co-scored by Lurie, which tells you something about how personal this project is.
Lucky Strike Film Review: The Story
Eastwood returns for his second collaboration with Lurie, playing an American soldier wandering Europe alone on foot, forced to pose as a Nazi after his battalion is decimated in a brutal attack. He stumbles through heaps of bodies on a desperate odyssey to somewhere, anywhere. The landscape is punishing. The isolation is total.
Eventually he finds a truck and a half dead American soldier lying frozen on the road. It is bleak, bombs are flying, and his walkie talkie is unreliable. His battalion knows he is out there and promises to send help, but help feels very far away. Then an American soldier appears out of nowhere with a dog and offers him a cigarette.
It sounds simple. It is anything but.
What Lurie does so well here is strip war down to its most human, most desperate elements. No grand battle sequences. No heroic speeches. Just one man trying to survive in a world that has completely collapsed around him, making impossible decisions about who to trust and how far to go to stay alive.
The film’s brutal wartime setting is something most of us cannot imagine. Beyond painting the stark reality of WWII and war in general, Lucky Strike works as a provocative think piece and one gripping cat and mouse tale.
Highly recommended.
