Big Picture Big Sound

She Is Lucky

I know I'm supposed to love "Lucky Grandma". It's a darling of other critics, but its wonderfulness escaped me. It's a gangster film, New York Chinatown style. It's also supposedly a dark comedy. I didn't find it to be dark or funny. I don't think it's bad, but special it ain't.

80-year-old Grandma Wong (Tsai Chin) lives alone in an apartment in Chinatown, New York. Her son and his family would prefer she move in with them, partly for her safety, partly to save him the expense of paying for two places. She's a pretty cantankerous sort who never smiles and who always has a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth.

After a fortune teller promises her that good luck will visit her soon, Grandma cleans out her entire bank account and brings it onto a casino bus to Foxwoods, Connecticut, along with other Chinese neighborhood locals. And the fortune teller turns out to be right - sort of. Grandma goes on an insane winning streak that sees her keep upping her bets until she has gathered an enormous bankroll.

As any gambler will tell you, you can't keep raising the stakes ad infinitum. Eventually she loses all of it on one bet and she is left with literally nothing. Even her bank account withdrawal is gone.

The bus ride home from the casino is subdued and sad, as most are, and it finds Grandma sitting next to a man who keeps falling asleep on her shoulder. Eventually, she realizes that he's not asleep. He's dead.

Before leaving the bus, she happens upon his bag, opens it, and it's got lots of thousand-dollar bills in it. She looks around and then takes it home. Until this point I thought I might be watching a really good film, but from there it slides into a whole bunch of non-believable moments,

"Lucky Grandma" has lots of make-believe gangsters doing un-gangster things. It's got lots of cartoonish characters. This must be what's supposed to make it a comedy, I think. The only thing that keeps it all from totally falling apart is an excellent performance by Tsai Chin, who deserves better. Again, this is not a bad movie, but I didn't feel lucky that I had seen it.