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The Lucky Ones Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for violence, profanity, and sexual situations) Genre: Comedy, Drama Theater release: September 26, 2008 by Lionsgate Directed by: Neil Burger Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes Cast: Rachel McAdams (Colee), Tim Robbins (Cheever), Michael Peña (TK) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

TK (Michael Peña) loves to work a crowd. As Teddy Roosevelt's son famously said of his father, he wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Actually, TK just wants to tell you about his remarkable experiences as the bride and the corpse, in his easygoing, no-really, I'm-not-BS'ing-you style. He's just holding forth on the extreme gratitude with which his girlfriend responds to his almost mystical knowledge of how to touch a woman, and is verging into the subject of multiple women, when the roadside IED hits.

No one is killed, though TK's weapon catches some shrapnel, rendering it useless and possibly saving his life. Then one of his buddies notices the slowly expanding patch of blood near the crotch of his fatigues, and the possibility suggests itself that the shrapnel-damaged weapon may be symbolic foreshadowing. Yes: TK has lost his mojo, in more ways than one, at least for the time being. Good luck getting him to talk now.

Michael Pena as TK

Colee (Rachel McAdams) lugs a fine guitar around with her, but she doesn't play it. She's more comfortable with her weapon in her hands, almost unsettlingly so, considering the frequency with which she thinks about having her weapon when she doesn't: sometimes wishing she did, sometimes glad she doesn't. The latter is probably the more sensible reaction.

Like TK, Colee has 30 days' leave due to an injury, though she isn't concerned about that; she was only shot in the leg. What matters is the guitar, which is not her instrument, but her mission: She's determined to return it to the family of its late owner, a fellow soldier who was also her boyfriend. The story behind the guitar is almost as incredible as TK's whoppers, the difference being that Colee believes her story completely.

Cheever? He's done. Out. He's done his duty, and he's going home. No-nonsense, down to earth, a calm eye amid chaotic circumstances, Cheever (Tim Robbins) seems the most centered, together guy in the movie, if not the entire Iraqi deployment. Technically he's injured too, and he doesn't mind acknowledging that he hurt his back when a Porta-John fell on him from a forklift. Aghast at such candor, TK tries to explain to Cheever the necessity of having a better story for the ladies, but Cheever breezily brushes this aside. He loves that Porta-John; it saved his life.

Rachel McAdams as Colee

The taproot of Cheever's emotional strength seems to be his marriage. When Colee, examining a photo, cheerily observes that his wife is a looker, Cheever willingly agrees. "I don't know what she's doing with a guy like me," he comments, "and I'm not going to ask." Robbins is such a good actor that he sells the line as a self-deprecating lover's devotion, and it might not even occur to you to wonder whether this isn't foreshadowing, too.

Colee, Cheever and TK are The Lucky Ones—the ones who lived and came home, or at least have lived so far. Of course it turns out that each of them has deeper wounds than the ones that brought them stateside; in fact, their real wounds are ones they had at the time they signed up, whether they knew it or not.

This could be the setup for a maudlin morass of introspective angst, but writer/director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) and co-writer Dirk Wittenborn want The Lucky Ones to be the Sideways or Little Miss Sunshine of the Iraqi war genre—and so Colee, Cheever and TK wind up together on a cross-country road trip of self-discovery. It's the American road-movie comedy as self-help therapy, and if it's a little glib about the trio's various issues and how they're addressed, well, that's the nature of the genre.

Tim Robbins as Cheever

Harder to overlook are the lapses that suggest the filmmakers don't necessarily understand their own characters much better than the civilians they encounter in their travels. The first key turning point, a painful reunion scene, is off-puttingly unconvincing; for a man like Cheever to be that wrong about the whole fabric of his life either defies belief, or at least requires more explanation or insight than the filmmakers have to offer. At one point I found myself pondering the long-shot possibility of a character suffering from a personality-altering brain tumor or something, which is as sure a sign as anything I can think of that the story isn't working.

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