Summary
Lucky begins at a fast pace and doesn’t really slow down in “No Shortcuts”, which is effective enough for a premiere but offers little to latch onto beyond intrigue.
Lucky, a show in which Anya Taylor-Joy plays an eponymous career conwoman who ironically has nothing but misfortune, perhaps takes the idea of being all-action a bit too far. Episode 1, “No Shortcuts”, is essentially one elongated chase sequence, with nary a thing to latch onto in terms of plot and character. While it’s fun to see the most distinctive-looking actress in the world trying to blend in by wearing a hoodie and, later, bleaching her hair peroxide blonde, I spent most of the premiere hoping it’d all just slow down a bit.
No such luck. We even begin in medias res, with Lucky being pursued and cornered by the FBI in a labyrinthine truck stop. Then we cycle back a ways to find Lucky and her husband, Cary, enjoying a nice time in a Caesar’s Palace penthouse suite with a suitcase full of cash. From their dialogue, we can infer that they’ve just pulled off a big job of one kind or another, which Lucky has a funny feeling about, and that she has daddy issues, since she carries her dad’s deus ex lighter around. This being a “one last job” heist thriller on paper, it’s a fairly interesting starting point to be picking up after the heist has already taken place.
Naturally, Lucky’s very cosy relationship with Cary is a harbinger of things to come, since he drugs her — or it’s at least implied that he did — and she wakes up the next morning with no money and the FBI at the door. Through convenient news broadcasts while Lucky is trying to sneak out of the casino, we get some important exposition. Lucky’s name is Luciana Armstrong. She and Cary are in the midst of a nationwide manhunt after stealing $10 million of government money. Special Agent Billie Rand is leading the search. And she has already found her target.
Cue a long sequence of Lucky dipping in and out of different rooms and corridors, trying to keep her head down and dodge CCTV and patrolling Feds. It isn’t wildly exciting, I have to say. The most interesting thing is a tiny detail about how the State of Nevada has limitations on the usage of casino security for anything other than rooting out gaming cheats. Despite this, though, one of the agents, Cruz, is able to spot Lucky sneaking out.
The smartest play of this whole sequence is introducing a wildcard element. Lucky isn’t just running from the FBI — she’s also running from a dude in a leather jacket, which makes her efforts to escape the Feds more difficult and complicated. She’s forced to paint on a black eye and feign domestic violence to convince a delivery driver to spirit her away. He sees through the makeup, but decides to help her anyway on the basis that anyone desperate enough to lie about DV is running away from something even more serious and dangerous. In the meantime, we get a very brief flashback that suggests Lucky and Cary were moving the money at the behest of the former’s incarcerated father, John, and that they didn’t, in fact, steal it themselves.
At her first opportunity, Lucky changes her hairstyle so she can stay one step ahead of the bus depot searches that Rand orders (hilariously, she’s still wearing a Caesar’s Palace jacket, which is a bit of a giveaway). She also manages to have a brief, coded chat with her father on the phone. Meanwhile, for the audience’s benefit, Rand pores over the hotel CCTV and realises that Lucky was running away from Leather Jacket Man. His name turns out to be Dutch, who is apparently the long-time enforcer for Whittaker, and Priscilla’s right hand. None of these names mean anything to us at this point.
Eventually, Lucky Episode 1 catches back up to the cold open, with a newly blonde Lucky being cornered by Mason, another of the Feds. Luckily — for her — Mason gets crushed by a car driven by Dutch, and we get to meet Priscilla, who’s inside. Cary, it turns out, is her son, and she’s looking for both him and the stolen money, since the money belongs to someone else even more dangerous. Of course, Lucky doesn’t have the money, but Priscilla isn’t inclined to believe that, since her daughter-in-law is a professional liar, so she has her bundled in the trunk of another car with a couple of goons.
Showing off her Houdini bona fides, Lucky uses her dad’s lighter to burn through her bonds, then finds an emergency kit with a couple of flares in it that she uses to facilitate a car crash and an escape. She does, however, have to stab one of her attackers in the head with a screwdriver from the same kit. Whatever works. The premiere ends with Lucky setting the car and corpses alight and walking coolly away into the desert. I get the sense we’re going to be seeing a lot of Taylor-Joy slowly walking away from things. It’s just that kind of show.
