Simply Perfect

Absolutely the worst movie.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

To refer to this 3 hour monstrosity as simply "self-indulgent" would be an understatement of breathtaking proportions. I write this brief review as a warning, and nothing more. To waste time critiquing its many pointless scenes would be useless, since many are just forgettable. But what we have here is a very talented cast wasting our time and theirs with several useless, random scenes barely intertwined into a dated critique of capitalism. And don't believe what you've heard about the music, either. Even that is bad. The basic plot synopsis that you will read on this site and in many film review books covers only a small fraction of what this film actually contains. It plays like a series of twenty minute short films, held together only by McDowell, and the little rock band. As good as McDowell is (and he acts well here too) even he can't sustain your interest. I mean this film is BAD. About the only other positive aspect of this is a young Helen Mirren who looks kind of like Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle. That's as good of a compliment I can come up with. That's how bad this is. Don't see it! 3 stars is all I can muster. Only for McDowell and Mirren.The Hound.

Most of the counterculture films of the period have the feel they improvised on the fly and are horribly self-indulgent. But where some hare-brained films like Easy Rider can win you over through the characters, soundtrack, technique, or dialogue (never mind that Easy Rider campfire diatribe, the Fifties were just as crappy as the Sixties politically), this film is dated and borders on cheesy. For some reason there is a guy in black face, because, it was metaphorical or something. Again, it's a counterculture film, they can make eccentric choices and film scholars can explain the brilliance of the casting choice later, that's their job. Also, the soundtrack is a huge part of the film, so if you don't like it, you will probably be annoyed. After the third song you will realize whether it will grow on you or not.It's hard to say that the film really works because the message is broad and unfocused. I don't think it is saying anything. The film is so absurd, erratic, and uninterested in developing characters you get the impression they either worked to fill out the plot by brainstorming ideas in all-nighters and intentionally shrugged off narrative or character arcs, or they filmed six hours and this was the most coherent cut they could salvage. Rarely do you invest three hours in a film and are left utterly apathetic to the character, who he is, why he is, or what it all means. You'd mistake this for a light-comedy for the ease this guy falls ass backward into willing sexual partners, but it isn't funny. However satire is too strong a word, instead it hovers awkwardly in the gap between.The film has an edge, the only reason Warner Brothers supposedly authorized it was the success of A Clockwork Orange but oddly it is not really shocking or entertaining though that was surely what it was going for. It doesn't date very well, most "edgy" farces don't. I have to reiterate, this whole production has the feel of a director who keeps saying "hit me" to the dealer on 18, and each time gets a seven.Jerry Lewis invented the "trick" ending and for some godawful reason the avant-garde community has never let go. I can't really say more without getting into spoiler territory, but the ending pretty much ends up justifying your suspicion that you've wasted your time watching a bunch of people have fun in front of a camera, instead of filming a movie.

My somewhat slow, long-term project of revisiting films of my youth that impacted me took me back to that staple of campus films societies at Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1970's, O Lucky Man!, where I first saw it. Unfortunately, it has not dated well, at least in my opinion. (I know, I used to have a romanticized memory of the movie in my head as well.) Seeing it again after many, many more years of film-viewing I see this movie as being too long by at least a third. I think it could have really benefited with stricter editing choices and a firmer hand on the story -- which is ironic since Lindsay Anderson himself allegedly kept telling Malcolm McDowell (and presumably the crew) that they needed to do that very same thing. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious -- and normally I'm a sucker for an ambitious "failure," ESPECIALLY by Hollywood standards -- but they lost the story for some of the anti-establishment points they were trying to make way too inconsistently to hold focus or interest. There are too many other reasons for falling short to mention here, but not the least of them is that it features the high-water mark of the career of Malcolm McDowell who was at the peak of his international fame between the two Lindsay Anderson films and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (although also very good later in Time After Time). Once his stock fell after the collapse of the British film industry and he was displaced to the United States (along with a very nasty cocaine habit), his career never fully recovered and seems to have tainted some of Anderson's legacy with him. History, as they say, is written by the winners and McDowell (though, admirably, he cleaned up and turned his life around) hasn't been on the winning end. And just to be clear, I like McDowell. The cast is terrific (including a very young Helen Mirren who looks amazingly similar to Jennifer Lawrence of today) which is why I give it a 5, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than for film history purposes (British New Wave film, the 1970's, Lindsay Anderson, etc.).

'O Lucky Man!' is a brilliant modern day tragedy befitting the times and culture in which in it was made. It is often very cynical and damning in it's critique of basically everything from capitalism, religion, and government. In many ways I found it more depressing than Anderson's masterpiece if... where we were first introduced to Malcolm McDowell's Mick Travis. 'O Lucky Man!' is a challenging film, it has really no plot or coherence to it. It is surrealist as it is described the only constant being the very naive Mick Travis is broken and broken by a society that eats up people who view the world with good and idealist eyes. Do we really like Travis? It's hard not to like Malcolm McDowell in anything even in the midsts of him playing sociopaths in if... or 'Clockwork Orange'. The thing about Travis that really draws the viewer in though is that his own personality s part of the surrealist landscape. No one is as hopeful or bright eyed of the world as Travis is. The great irony about 'O Lucky Man!' stems from taking this character and placing him in this hell. What I really appreciate about this film and if... that preceded it is the idea of Travis being an everyman. The societies in if... and 'Oh Lucky Man' are exaggerated to be sure but they offer an interesting exploration of these ideas. if... was a film about the young and old and how they violently collide and yet I find 'O Lucky Man' much more troubling. Essentially the film is about the breaking of Michael Travis. It's about money, the young and the old, and more importantly about finding an ideology to live by. Travis thinks he can make it in this world and the film mercilessly says that one cannot make their own destiny. That is what 'O Lucky Man' is about.. I find the soundtrack and even the irony of Travis eventually becoming the lucky man fascinating. Anderson has created a comedy of the blackest sort. Society says one thing and we see another.Michael Travis eventually gets his luck but at what cost? He signs his life away several times over the course of the film and the bright eyed youngster is reduced to a broken cynic by it's end. When the world eventually finds some use of Michael Travis, Michael Travis ceases to exist. I love that Anderson portrays this as a light hearted comedy because it is in actuality a very very dark film and that's what makes it all the funnier. We are asked to laugh at dreams and laugh at Travis because he resists cynicism. And of course the film ends when he becomes a cynic, brilliant and frightening.