“Based on the American Dream.”
These are the words that greet audiences before anything else when pressing “play” on Daniel Brown’s feature-length version of his story Your Lucky Day. The words shouldn’t be ominous, yet things in the country have, for some time now, going back decades, shifted so that the concept of the “American Dream” is not a promise of what can happen when you work hard, but something that’s used to keep the lower and middle class grinding. You, too, can have the thing; you, too, can be wealthy and famous; you, too, can be rich beyond your dreams if you work hard enough. But even if you make it into the upper echelon of society, there’s no guarantee that it can’t or won’t be stripped from you, if you’re deemed unworthy. See: the battle of New Money vs Old Money. Told over the course of one rotten evening, Your Lucky Day is Brown asking the audience what they would do, what they would risk, in order to change their station in life via a single $156 million lotto ticket? Though the film doesn’t play like a judgment on the characters for their choices, necessarily, one can’t help but acknowledge that a system that promises big money is not built in your favor and Brown’s script reminds us of this at every turn.
Angus Cloud as Sterling in YOUR LUCKY DAY. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
On a regular December evening at the Sip ‘N Go convenience store, owner Amir (Mousa Kraish) works the counter while customers Ana Marlene and Abraham (Jessica Garza and Elliot Knight, respectively) mill around in the back discussing which ice cream to buy, beat-cop Cody (Sterling Beaumon) comes in to use the bathroom, and Mr. Laird (Spencer Garrett) grabs some snacks. After attempting chit-chat with Amir that includes thickly racist overtones, Laird checks his recent Mega*ball tickets and discovers he’s won the jackpot. While those at the store seem to understand it couldn’t happen to a worse person, recently mugged drug-dealer Sterling (Angus Cloud) sees it as an opportunity to right a karmic wrong and attempts to rob Laird of the ticket. But when this go deadly wrong, Sterling improvises a plan that may either make accomplices or victims of them all.
Though this is a first-time review for Elements of Madness, as a home release review, we will be discussing several narrative-related aspects in order to be best explore Brown’s work. Consider this your spoiler-warning.
L-R: Elliot Knight as Abraham and Jessica Garza as Ana in YOUR LUCKY DAY. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
Doing the right thing is hard. Doing the right thing for the right reason is harder. Throughout Your Lucky Day, Brown creates situation after situation in which characters are presented with opportunities to do the right thing, and each time a choice is made to do the selfish thing. Now, there’s an argument to be made that trying to stay alive isn’t selfish and, therefore, an opening is created for explaining away all that happens once Sterling pulls a gun on Laird. So let’s walk through some of this because Brown leaves very little unscathed in this searing takedown of capitalism and the American Dream. Our introduction into the story is Sterling, a drug dealer who gets mugged by a seller/customer who shorts him before stealing everything off of him — a sequence that puts Sterling in an elevated emotional state while simultaneously establishing “no honor among thieves,” which will come into play later. Then there’s Laird, played by Garrett (Iron Man 3; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), who’s always fantastic at playing the jackass, who comes into Amir’s shop and insults the man almost immediately with a series of racist tropes and backhanded compliments. The man feels comfortable standing in an establishment owned by someone else, filled with the presumption that “the customer is always right…,” ignorant or uncaring that the rest of that statement is “… in matters of taste.” So, when Sterling pulls a gun on him to steal the ticket, Brown’s created an environment where we don’t mind it happening so much, even if we don’t agree with it, putting the audience in a state of complicity. Now, I’m of the mind that Sterling is responsible for all that follows in the film simply because of how he went about trying to get the ticket, but Cody is the one who owns his fair share of that responsibility by being shitty at his job. Without question, Cody is the reason that things escalate from bad to worse, because all he had to do was call for backup, get himself into a position that wasn’t directly behind Laird, and — gee — maybe not fire his weapon. Before Your Lucky Day gets to the point of feeling like Assault of Precinct 13 (1976), the audience is clued into the fact that Cody is part of a lineage of cops who see themselves as deserving of reward simply by wearing the badge, instead of what they are supposed to be, keepers of the peace, servants of the community. Even bleeding out, Cody’s more interested in the lottery ticket than preventing theft or the loss of innocent lives. This is what the American Dream is — bloody avarice where all other lives are mere stepping stones to what each individual tells themselves they deserve.
Impressively, due to the characterization from Brown and the performances from the cast, one doesn’t entirely see the core characters of Sterling, Ana, Abraham, and Amir as wholly terrible, without redemption, or incapable of making the right choice. Brown creates opportunities to demonstrate that each are born into systems that the American Dream tells them they can escape from, yet change never comes in the way they were told. Sterling provides an apt example via an anecdote about his father of the pious man who dies young due to lack of financial security to take care of a medical condition; Ana is the smart dental student taken advantage of by her boss who (a) gets her pregnant and then (b) casts her out for being pregnant and, therefore, being a threat to his station/status; Abraham is a young black pianist who’s immediately considered suspect by authorities because of the story the public’s been sold about his demographic; and Amir is viewed as less-than for being an immigrant simply because of his ethnicity and faith when there’s no evidence that Amir wasn’t born and raised in the U.S.. Whether the characters outright state their issues or they come out through natural dialogue, Your Lucky Day posits that the American Dream is a false-promise, each challenge presented to the core characters being another physical expression of that false-promise. It doesn’t matter what one feels about whether any of the characters on display are ethical, they are assuredly not and so frequently choose the easy wrong choice over the hard right one, and it’s all because the carrot that is a lottery prize system is unrecognizable as the stick that it is designed to be.
Jason O’Mara as Captain Rutledge in YOUR LUCKY DAY. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
Unfortunately, if you’re looking for bonus features to further flesh out the narrative or provide a sense of how Brown adapted his short into a feature, there’s nothing on this edition that will do that. There’s a full trailer and three previews for other Well Go USA releases, but not a single thing that offers insight into the creation of the film. For those with whom Brown’s story resonates, this is a major bummer. Thankfully, Brown and some of the cast did participate in press interviews ahead of the theatrical release in November 2023, so you can always jump over to the conversation between Brown and Garcia with EoM’s own Senior Interviewer Thomas Manning to watch their conversation. At the very least, the on-disc presentation is solid with the audio doing some heavy lifting to create immersion between the gun fire, rain, and alarms that sound. So, while there may be nothing to really expand the experience, at least it looks and sounds as one hopes from a 1080p HD disc.
Jessica Garza as Ana in YOUR LUCKY DAY. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA.
It’s a dark concept, but, sometimes, all we can do in this life is survive. However, what makes it lighter, what prevents everything from succumbing into despair is that surviving doesn’t *have* to mean at the expense of others. If the American Dream is the notion that anyone can make it, that anyone from any background can pull off the impossible and lift themselves up by their bootstraps (a phrase that’s the literal definition of impossible), then what’s stopping any of us from living the life of the rich and famous? To paraphrase Sterling, there’s no single rich person that’s gotten that way without hurting someone else, either literally or through exploitation. But there’s another way where each of us can have enough and that should be the real dream. Not the one filled with champagne, room service, and constant pleasure, but the one where people don’t have to kill themselves to break even, can focus on art and education without fear of where their next meal is coming from or clothes or shelter. The Dream shouldn’t be that the lucky few can rise up, but that all can. Brown paints a version of the American experience that’s running with blood and, frankly, I can’t think of a reason to argue. That’s the kind of gut-punch Your Lucky Day is, you can’t argue with it, even if all it would’ve taken to prevent it all is just a little kindness and grace.
Available on VOD November 14th, 2023.
Available on Blu-ray and digital January 23rd, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Well Go USA Your Lucky Day webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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