Lucky review: Anya Taylor-Joys con woman drama is slick summer fun with little substance

Lucky puts its cards on the table too early.

The new Apple TV limited series, starring and executive produced by Anya Taylor-Joy, kicks off with its titular protagonist (Taylor-Joy) on the run from an FBI agent. Sporting a bleached bob and a Caesars Palace jacket, she scrambles through a maze of parked trucks, desperately crawling under wheels and slamming around corners until her fate finally catches up with her. It’s a fairly thrilling action sequence, but soon, all too predictably, Lucky flashes back to the fateful hours leading up to this high-octane chase.

The move is an all-too common one in film and TV, meant to give viewers a tantalizing taste of what’s to come. Often, though, it feels like titles that use this tactic aren’t confident that viewers will buy into their story without the promise of action. With Lucky, that unfortunately proves to be the case. A crime drama bursting with clichés, Lucky works best when its characters are getting out of serious scrapes, and less so when they’re actually talking.

What’s Lucky about?

Anya Taylor-Joy in “Lucky.”
Credit: Apple TV

As we learn in the first of Lucky‘s many flashbacks, the woman on the run in the show’s opening is Lucky Armstrong, con woman extraordinaire. Together with her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), she’s just pulled off a $10 million heist that should have her set for life. The pair spend a sweet night celebrating in Las Vegas, but by the morning, Lucky wakes to find herself alone, penniless, and at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list.

So begins one of Lucky‘s most tense sequences. As the FBI descends on Caesars Palace, she must use all her wiles to escape from a seemingly impossible trap. It’s an electrifying cat-and-mouse game, following an increasingly desperate Lucky through crowded casino floors and winding hotel rooms.

The Caesars Hotel sequence is just the first of many thrilling set pieces throughout Lucky‘s run, including shoot-outs, car chases, and one desert-set escape that sees Taylor-Joy channeling the same fierce drive to survive she weaponized so well in 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. In all these scenes, Lucky is operating at her most desperate, which means we get to see her full bag of tricks, learned from her imprisoned father, John (Timothy Olyphant), at work. As she manipulates mark after mark, Taylor-Joy brings an effortless cool to Lucky. Sometimes, though, that cool can be overpowering, and we lose the fear and anger that’s driving Lucky in her quest to set things right. (It doesn’t help that, even after going through hell, Lucky’s bob remains chic as ever, making it hard to buy into the character’s gritty struggles.)

Outside of these sequences though, Lucky loses its steam. Its overreliance on flashbacks leads to some extremely on-the-nose moments, like when Lucky pulls a con at a birthday party, all while remembering a conveniently similar job she and her father pulled years ago. Elsewhere, story beats feel oddly familiar. At one point, Lucky pretends to be drunk while meeting a man at a bar, leading to a scene eerily reminiscent of one in Promising Young Woman.

Annette Bening is an ice-cold scene stealer in Lucky.

Annette Bening in “Lucky.”
Credit: Apple TV

Lucky weaves a larger web of crime and shady syndicates that pales in comparison to the more immediate drama of Lucky’s smaller cons. However, there’s one huge saving grace to that more overarching crime tale, and that’s Annette Bening as fearsome mobster Priscilla Masterson.

Always rocking the coolest glasses and coats the show has to offer, Bening’s Priscilla takes over every scene she’s in with an icy power. At times, she’s calculatedly nonchalant, with even her most casual comments oozing with threats. At others, she’s a laugh riot thanks to her dry disdain for everyone around her. She makes a great foil for Taylor-Joy’s often-harried Lucky, as she’s almost always in control. When she’s not, it’s because she’s under the thumb of the menacing Wayne Whittaker (William Fichtner). You can imagine that as Lucky grows older, she could find herself in a similar troubling situation: still living a life of crime, still expected to take the fall.

Lucky hopes to examine how Lucky could get off that path, the one her father set her on when she was a child. Its conclusions and twists along the way are fairly predictable, but it offers up some slick summer fun in the meantime. When you’re done, though, Lucky‘s impact is like that of a good con man: gone before you even know it.

The first two episodes of Lucky premiere July 15 on Apple TV, with a new episode every Wednesday.