As a reviewer, I would say it was my sheer bad luck that I had to watch Luck. Nothing quite works in this supposed edge-of-the-seat action packed film right from the inane voice over in the beginning that tells us that Mumbai is a place where you need money to live or talk on the mobile (sure, as if life is free outside Mumbai). The film, most ineptly directed, is nothing but a set piece of action pieces linked flimsily by an extremely poor excuse of a script. The idea of the film seemed to have been picked up in bits and pieces from Intacto, The Condemned and 13 Tzameti. While the premise uses luck as a justification for pitting man against man in a fight to the death, it is a dangerous and barbaric thought and what's even worse is that  the man who thought it all up as a scheme to make easy money, coolly goes scot free in the end.

The problems with the script are innumerable. While one is not expecting logic, the film and characters must at least appear to be credible if the film is supposed to involve you. Luck fails here miserably. The thin plotline suffers from much predictability with few twists and turns and even some of those just don’t work - the Ayesha-Natasha track for one. Musa calls ‘lucky’ people from all over the world but all we really see are the Bollywood actors with the others in the background to be dispensed with as and when necessary. We see back stories (mostly stereotypical and horribly clichéd with sick wives and mothers) of only our Indian actors but not the firangs - a pity, because one could have truly opened up the scope and range of the film far more here. The human interactions between the action sequences, where character building and bonding could have been done, are handled terribly barring perhaps the one scene in hospital with Short Cut and the love story is just not happening. Gobsmackingly, even today it needs a rape attempt on the heroine and the hero bashing up the would-be rapist to win her love! Honestly!

Loopholes are aplenty. The whole blown action sequences happily take place in open spaces without the trouble of bothering about cops and the like. Imran is wanted for a robbery and he has been seen by the security personnel of the bank he works at. Surely they would know where he stays and the bank would have the cops on him in no time. And yet, he walks about freely, shopping in the mall with his mother, having no fear that cops could be on to him. OK, the rope breaks when Ravi Kishen is hung and the law says that you cannot be hung twice. But does it mean he can be set free knowing that he is a serial killer and would kill again??? The film drills you with profound sounding dialogue about luck every two minutes till it hurts but the big climactic action sequence has nothing to do with luck as it is little more than a set piece designed for the hero to save the damsel-in-distress with the villain out to stop him. And the less said about the epilogue the better.

There’s nothing one can really write about the performances either. The script gives the actors no scope and neither are they able to rise above the script. Mithun is efficient enough, Sanjay Dutt appears bored, Imran seems to have a limited range, Ravi Kishen is OTT, Chitrasi Rawat the most earnest of the lot while one really doesn’t know if Shruti Haasan has inherited the acting talents of her parents (Kamal Haasan and Sarika) since she shows none here, her dialogue delivery being particularly weak and stilted. Admittedly, she is curvy enough, carries off wearing a bikini with flair and is a pretty good singer (hear her warble in the Adiyae Kolluthey number in the Tamil film Vaaranam Aayiram (2008)), who has also been a part of a band, so maybe her true calling is in the world of pop music rather than acting (at least on the evidence of this act).

Technically too, for all the money spent, the film is a letdown. It should have been far more polished and stylised. The film is inconsistently shot - unable to exploit the locales as well as they should have been, the overdose of people walking towards the camera in slow motion in our films is now beginning to pall, the editing is desperate, obvious and flashy, the music very average, the background score overblown and even the supposed USP of the film – the action scenes, frankly, are nothing to write home about. In fact, the opening sequence in particular, is rather badly executed - see how Sanjay Dutt is tackily composited into the frame. The big, ridiculous climactic fight, shot supposedly for 10 days atop the moving, burning train, too fails to grip you.

All in all, Luck is highly avoidable.