The Lucky Ones"" is one of a few movies in recent years to deal with the war in Iraq, though this particular one isn't about the war at all, but three ""lucky"" soldiers who meet on a plane ride home after facing and surviving combat. With the number of contrivances and plot holes apparent in the script, it would appear at first glance director Neil Burger's film fails to show much of anything. Instead, it is saved by solid performances from Rachel McAdams, Michael Pena and Tim Robbins. At times surprisingly subtle and touching, the film is a lighthearted, fresh take on the lives of soldiers in modern America.
McAdams, in her first major role since 2005's ""The Family Stone,"" plays Colee Dunn, a young blue-collar soldier who meets recently wounded (in his privates, to be specific) T.K. Poole (Pena) and middle-aged Fred Cheever (Tim Robbins), who is at the end of his tour. The three seem to have little in common until a New York blackout cancels their flights, sending them on a rental-car road trip across Middle America to their respective locations. Cheever is headed home to St. Louis, and Dunn and Poole are bound for Las Vegas so Dunn can return a deceased friend's guitar to his family and Poole can find professional hookers to cure his impotence.
Much of the story seems convoluted and full of many clichéd aspects of road-trip movies, yet, at the same time, it is never quite predictable. There's your bar fight, your car breakdown, your inevitable sexual tension between the younger pair, but it's still unclear how everything will play out.
As the film progresses, the soldiers discover that, after surviving the war and being ""the lucky ones,"" America doesn't welcome them with the open arms and gratitude they had expected. Cheever comes home to find his wife demanding a divorce and a son asking for money to go to Stanford. Dunn is mocked at a college bar (though the scene is terribly executed and unrealistic), and Pena is worried his fiancée won't love him with his new sexual impotence.
The script is pretty flat, but McAdams brings a measure of joy and humor that makes the film watchable. Even dressed down with mousy brown hair and a limp from a leg injury, McAdams' Colee absolutely lights up the screen. Pena and Robbins are almost as good, and the three play off each other nicely enough to sustain the ridiculous things that come in their way, including a tornado that comes out of nowhere at one point.
At the movie's center is the treatment of soldiers in a society that doesn't support a war. The stigma of returned soldiers has changed since the wars of the 20th century, and though the movie doesn't spout any political messages, Burger's film will no doubt leave audiences satisfied and thinking.
