Anya Taylor-Joy’s Unsatisfying Apple TV Con Thriller

In a good con artist story, the marks are rarely the focal characters, but they’re often just as important.

A grotesquely rich mark is an indication that the swindlers are the heroes and the tale has eat-the-rich undertones, making flimflammery into the last refuge of the desperate everyman.

An overly sympathetic mark is an indication that the swindlers are villains, or at the very least anti-heroes, so desperate that they throw away class solidarity to make a quick buck.

And if the mark is a MacGuffin, a few meaningless keywords tossed around without anything tangible to invest in, the rest of the story had darned well be delightful. Otherwise it’s going to feel insufficiently considered to the point of meaninglessness.

That the main con in Apple TV‘s Lucky takes place before the events of the series, makes no sense, and therefore adds nothing to the principal story isn’t necessarily the only reason nothing in the seven-episode limited series clicks. But it’s representative of the choices made in an adaptation that scraps the entirety of the book being adapted and replaces those elements with motley bits and pieces that fail to generate a consistent tone, theme or pace. It’s a show about an identity-swapping heroine that has no sense of its own identity.

It isn’t even that Marissa Stapley’s book is particularly good. It’s a frivolous beach read with an interesting main character. It’s more that Jonathan Tropper’s take on the material is half frivolous lark, half self-important commentary, wholly nothing in particular, though Anya Taylor-Joy and a solid ensemble cast work hard to swim against the underdeveloped stream.

Taylor-Joy plays Lucky, a young con woman semi-reluctantly raised into The Life by her now-incarcerated con man father, John (Timothy Olyphant).

Lucky and hubby Cary (Drew Starkey) are enjoying one last night of revelry in Las Vegas before fleeing the country with a briefcase containing nearly $10 million in cash, money skimmed by her father from an elaborate scam perpetrated by his mother (Annette Bening‘s Priscilla) and a wealthy, shady big boss (William Fichtner’s Whittaker).

What was that scam? Something stupid about oil. I’m not even sure if that’s the con I referred to above because it’s so amorphous. Who is the victim? Is it us? Does it matter? Is there something Tropper could have done involving price-fixing in the oil industry? Perhaps. Does he get anything at all out of that backdrop here? Nope.

Anyway, after said night of revelry, Lucky wakes up alone. Did something happen to Cary or was Lucky the mark? It’s completely impossible to care, but things start moving so quickly that “caring” becomes immaterial.

Almost immediately, Lucky is fleeing from Priscilla and her chief enforcer Dutch (Clifton Collins Jr.), and from a dogged FBI agent (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) determined to bring everybody down. Like Netflix’s hit Harlen Coben adaptation I Will Find You, it’s another triangulated search that allows or requires every piece of exposition to be delivered in triplicate, at the expense of what ought to be pretty clean “run or die” momentum.

Anybody who has read the book will note that its primary plotlines involve Lucky’s search for her birth mother and her possession of a winning lottery ticket she knows she can’t cash because she’s a wanted woman for a scam tied to bilking senior citizens of their investment income. Every bit of that has been scrubbed, to the degree that I wonder why, if all Apple, Tropper and executive producers Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine wanted to do was make a show about a reluctant con woman with a con man father, any source material was required at all. This is as much a remake of Paper Moon as it is an adaptation of Lucky, and it definitely isn’t that either.

Tropper and the series seem to actively hate the lightness of the book, the idea that you can perpetrate frauds and still be a redeemable heroine, without having the necessary intellectual heft to complicate things in a meaningful way. Tropper’s Your Friends & Neighbors, imperfect as it is, does a lot of the same things only much better, and neither show approaches the level of viewer-challenging moral ambiguity of Tropper’s Banshee.

Participating in television’s ongoing “everything is the wrong length” epidemic, Lucky, at seven episodes, is exactly the wrong length. Anything shorter and things would perhaps move fast enough for us to ignore how poorly developed every supporting character is; anything longer might have allowed for the story to feel fully inhabited by real characters, not plot catalysts played by overqualified performers.

The series sets viewers up with a pilot that’s almost entirely a Run Lola Run-style pursuit, with Taylor-Joy’s Lucky weaving in and out of casinos and making various daring escapes, all while changing her hairstyle and look in ways that aren’t convincing given that Taylor-Joy is mighty distinctive. Still, it’s entertaining, and Taylor-Joy is having a blast playing a woman easily able to inhabit multiple personae, all while sneaking into and out of labyrinthine casino passageways and leaping across various trucks at a rest station. Jonathan Van Tulleken, who directed the first and last two episodes of the series, isn’t great at the lighter elements of the story, but he moves things along.

Then there are a couple of episodes in which the pieces are navigated around the chess board — man, Lucky isn’t in the same league as Taylor-Joy’s last limited series, Queen’s Gambit — with repeated exposition and more outfit and hairstyle changes. Finally, the series closes with two episodes building to a climax in which every twist is precisely predictable.

Wedged in-between is a fourth episode, directed by Jet Wilkinson, that includes both a bruising car chase through Long Beach playing San Diego and lots of characters yelling sanctimoniously at each other and underlining the line of dialogue that gives the episode its title — “Are We Bad People?”

The answer would theoretically be “yes” and I would theoretically be fully game to have a show in which the main characters are constantly facing their imperfections. That’s good drama! But in Lucky, the characters are, mostly, barely characters, which makes it hard to invest in whether or not they’re “bad” or “good.”

When Lucky and Cary shout at each other, it isn’t a fair fight because one is the main character in the series played by an exceptionally versatile actress and the other is some guy played by some guy (Starkey has been good in other things in the past, but Cary is a useless role).

Priscilla and Whittaker yelling at each other is closer to a fair fight, since Bening and Fichtner are fine actors on comfortable footing. Still, he’s on slithery autopilot and she’s mostly there to evoke memories of The Grifters, which doesn’t work when the material’s sense of moral ambiguity is so much less refined than the murky pragmatism driving Stephen Frears’ classic. Thanks to Bening, it’s possible to go seven episodes without wondering why Priscilla is defined by her love of horses, her love of her boring, boring son (she at least knows he’s a waste of time) and nothing else. Priscilla is the series’ main antagonist and she’s a cipher brought very partially to life by a great actor.

See also Ellis-Taylor, so solid and so intense that you barely realize the only things we know about Agent Rand are things other characters tell her about herself in clumsy fashion. Ellis-Taylor and Olyphant gave the recent Justified reboot season its beating heart and it’s disappointing that nobody on Lucky was able to capitalize on that chemistry for more than a scene or two. More frequently, Ellis-Taylor has to share her scenes with Mo McRae’s Agent Gates and with Eric Lange as her surly boss, and McRae and Lange are stuck with characters who might as well have been named “Generic Partner” and “Generic Boss.”

Taylor-Joy and Olyphant are really the series’ standouts: the former because Lucky is an entertaining mix-and-match character, even if eliminating most of the the book’s flashback structure eliminates most of the depth to her character’s reluctance; the latter because both Olyphant and Tropper are smart enough to emphasize the imperfections in his slickly charming huckster archetype.

But John isn’t much of a character either, and it’s hard to take this thin half-hearted “It’s tough to be the son or daughter of a career criminal/con man” meditation seriously. Or humorously. Or thrillingly. Whatever Lucky wants to be or thought it could be, it doesn’t come together as more than an uneven diversion with a super Fiona Apple theme song.