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Then there's Colee's Southern-fried fundamentalist religiosity. Colee drags her male companions to a vaguely Pentecostal-type service and even makes a point of asking for prayer, and she has very definite ideas about morality and eschatology—so definite that she warns Cheever that if he commits suicide, he will go, not merely to hell, but what is apparently worse, to "the lake of faahr." Yet when the nature of TK's injury becomes clear, Colee begins a frank, extensive analysis of practical erotic possibilities for "pleasuring" his girlfriend, including considering a "threesome," possible paraphernalia, and so forth—without raising any moral considerations at all.

Later, Colee makes a point of engaging the services of a trio of friendly itinerant "sex workers" to try to help TK get his groove back, though she had earlier apparently been disparaging of what she presumed were his prurient reasons for wanting to go to Las Vegas. And when she discovers another character in an adulterous one-night stand, her main reaction is good-natured merriment. What exactly is her religious background again? And I don't care how uninhibited or plainspoken Colee is—nobody without a mental disorder wanders into a strange church service and blithely announces prayer requests on sensitive subjects with that level of specificity, particularly on behalf of others.

The three vets are the lucky ones.

After running through some pretty contrived paces for much of its running time, The Lucky Ones has some surprises in the last act that ultimately make it more satisfying than it might have been. Honor, sacrifice, and loyalty do count for something, and tough decisions characters thought they would never make turn out to be thinkable after all.

Refreshingly, The Lucky Ones avoids the pitfall affecting so many recent Hollywood offerings touching on this subject matter: it isn't political. (The very presence of the famously outspoken Robbins as a Midwestern military man at least threatens to raise the political temperature, but it's like what Harrison Ford said about kissing Anne Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights: "It's called acting.")

In fact, it isn't until the very last scene that the film commits to particular locations in the Middle East; prior to that, when a civilian asks the three, "Were you over there?" it could refer to Afghanistan, or for that matter any of hundreds of oversea bases.

It's one of the movie's nice touches that civilians are genuinely appreciative of the soldiers' service "over there." On more than one occasion the protagonists' veteran status gets them special treatment, and it becomes a running joke that they can't thank anyone without getting the reply, "No—thank you." Over time this "Thank you" becomes a little shallow, but it isn't insincere. The movie is like that too, I think.

Talk About It

1. One of the film's running themes is truth and falsehood. What are some of the reasons characters in the film tell lies? Are any of these reasons any better or worse than any others? Can a lie ever be justifiable?
2. Is there ever such a thing as too much truth? Does any character in the film illustrate that principle? When can it be better not to tell the whole truth?
3. When Cheever is asked what the soldiers "over there" are trying to accomplish, he replies that they're trying to keep from being killed. What do you think of this answer? Do you know anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan? What have you learned from them about the conflict in that region?

The Family Corner

The Lucky Ones is rated R for "violence, profanity, sexual situations." There's a roadside bombing and some brief scuffling in a bar that doesn't quite become a brawl. Two otherwise married characters are seen in flagrante delicto (no explicit nudity) by an unhealthily interested third party, and there's a fair amount of crude or sexually explicit dialogue, often related to TK's condition. There is also some misuse of the Lord's name.

Photos © Copyright Lionsgate

© Steven D. Greydanus subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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