Your Lucky Day

The heart is in the right place for Your Lucky Day, but the execution is a little loose.

It's thrilling and suspenseful, with enough twists to keep you guessing, but the pointed commentary is impossible to ignore.

The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.

Writer-director Daniel Brown’s crime drama is deceptively simple with a beer case’s worth of twists, most of which are unpredictable but make perfect character sense as they unfold.

Brown uses it to craft an intense siege thriller filled with characters making surprising choices and moral concessions. Anchored by Garza’s charismatic, primal turn, Your Lucky Day makes for an impressive debut that’ll leave you on edge.

Your Lucky Day moves along at an engaging pace throughout, although it doesn't reach its brutal potential as a thriller until two-thirds of the way through. Up to that point, it's burdened by clumsy repetition of its central theme.

Your Lucky Day is the consummate kind of low-budget independent film that showcases the talent of its cast, tells an engaging story, and doesn’t take too much time doing so, foreshadowing a promising career for its writer-director Daniel Brown.

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.

It's very well worked out, very gruesome, and totally compelling.

Daniel Brown’s feature debut Your Lucky Day is a smart thriller that manages to be lean and mean while still offering up some excellent social criticism.