Lucky Strike: Lurie’s Story of American Service and Survival

Today, it would be a scandal if the government supplied cigarettes to our troops, but during WWII, they were staples of K and C ration packages. At the time, the government and military figured they might as well give the soldiers fighting for democracy what they wanted, instead of telling them how to live. Can you imagine? Consequently, the Lucky Strike company played up its connection to the troops with its “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war” campaign. Indeed, Captain Castle goes through Hell with his brand of choice in Rod Lurie’s Lucky Strike, which is still playing in theaters.

The opening prologue fully and shockingly establishes the brutality of the Waffen-SS and the constant specter of death hovering over Allied troops during the Battle of the Bulge. Unfortunately, that is exactly the sort danger Castle must brave with his squad. Their orders are simple. Block a vital road to prevent German troop advances. The execution will be a you-know-what show. In fact, Captain Castle will be the mission’s sole survivor, unless you also count “Lassie,” the squad’s trusty Motorola SCR-300 radio, so-nicknamed for its reliability. As the voice from HQ tells him, Lassie will be his lifeline, until he reaches the extraction point, so he’d better protect it.

Getting to the rally spot will be a harrowing journey, as the older Col. Castle explains years after the fact to the somewhat confused Mrs. Caldwell. For reasons that are not immediately clear, he invited himself in and started chronicling his harrowing tale of survival. However, she will indulge him for a while, out of respect, since she also lost her son, a member of the 761^st Tank Battalion, during the Battle of the Bulge.

Lurie happens to be a Westpoint graduate, which gives viewers confidence he will treat his Army characters with the respect they deserve. Indeed, he and military advisor Jariko Denman (a fifteen-year-plus Ranger combat veteran) realized the warfighting scenes with a very high degree of historical accuracy, including the use of vintage tanks and vehicles that were authentic to the combat in the Ardennes. To his credit, Lurie skillfully stages battle scenes that are confusing and disorienting, in a deliberate, realistic kind of way.

The Senior, from Angel Studios

Mike Flynt played football for Permian High School, one of the two schools prominently featured in Friday Night Lights. He then went on to one of the most unconventional collegiate careers ever. He was team captain his junior year, but he was expelled just as the next year started. Of course, that left a full year of college eligibility that he returns to fulfill in Rod Lurie’s The Senior, which opens today in theaters, from Angel Studios.

Flynt’s one great regret was missing out on his senior year of football. Years later, he still has anger management issues, despite the positive influence of his tough but loving wife Eileen. Although Flynt was more restrained than his emotionally abusive father J.V., he still repeated some of the same mistakes with his grown son, Micah.

Reluctantly, Flynt returns for a team reunion, finding he is still welcome at Sul Ross State University. Although he wouldn’t put it in such terms, Flynt clearly believes he has long suffered from bad karma caused by the loss of his senior year, so he decides to re-balance the mojo scales by re-enrolling and completing his college eligibility. Of course, that will be easier said than done for the 59-year-old, but Coach Sam Weston agrees to let him try out.

Naturally, Flynt makes each successive cut (sometimes just barely), but Weston remains reluctant to actually put him into a game. Heck, even Weston likens Flynt to Sean Astin in Rudy. Nevertheless, Flynt slowly and steadily wins over most of his teammates, who appreciate his advice regarding matters on and off the field. Nevertheless, there are some who still resent him for being a distraction or a novelty act.

In fact, it is rather easy and apt to describe The Senior as a cross between Rudy and Friday Night Lights, but Robert Eisele’s screenplay is more restrained and less manipulative than most sports movies. Flynt must finally deal with more important things than the last game of the season.

Christian faith also has a positive role to play, which will most likely not offend Angel’s core demographics. However, Lurie and Eisele introduce such themes in smart, unobtrusive ways. The most overt references involve Flynt’s stern father’s secret turn towards Christianity, in hopes of finding some degree of redemption or atonement. Frankly, this modest subplot lands with as much force as the gridiron business.

Exploiting Peckinpah: the Straw Dogs Remake

“Dueling Banjos” must be expensive music to license. It is about the only thing missing from the formerly indie Rod Lurie’s red state-phobic remake of Sam Peckinpah’s career-defining film, Straw Dogs. Transferred from the English countryside to the Deep South, the once edgy examination of violent human nature is now a standard issue killer hillbilly movie (trailer here), which opens today nationwide.

The prodigal television ingénue Amy Sumner tells her screenwriter husband David her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi is properly pronounced “Backwater.” There you have the film’s flash of wit. It also tells viewers what to expect of the locals. Everyone watched her canceled show, including her former high school beau Charlie Venner, whom her husband hires to fix their hurricane damaged barn. In retrospect, this is a bad idea.

Venner, his brother Darryl, his other brother Darryl, and their wacky next door neighbor, the unmistakably psychotic Norm, do not exactly hustle on the job, taking plenty of breaks to leer at her and deride his manhood, such as it is. Things quickly escalate when one of the good old boys strings up the family cat in their closet. Yet, Sumner will not confront them directly, preferring to confuse them with his cryptic beating around the bush. Eventually though, things get way out of hand, forcing Sumner to defend home, hearth, and Jeremy Niles, a developmentally disabled grown man with an implied history of inappropriate behavior, whom the gruesome foursome and their former football coach, Tom Heddon, are out to lynch.

Strangely, Lurie’s adaptation hardly ever deviates from the basic structure of Peckinpah’s original, yet he clearly has no clue what made it so effective. For one thing, the 1971 film pulled a cultural reverse, unleashing a violent maelstrom against the picturesque backdrop of Cornwall, while casting a Yank as the pacifist victim. However, a city slicker terrorized by a pack of southern hicks is a real dog-bites-man story in Hollywood.

As a nebbish mathematician, the responses of Dustin Hoffman’s Sumner also made more sense in the context of Peckinpah’s film. It is not hard to imagine he might have been bullied before and is reverting to old survival strategies in his attempts to befriend his antagonists. In contrast, James Marsden’s snobby jag-driving outspokenly atheistic screenwriter never seemed to have a bad day in his life before he got to Blackwater. Frankly, Venner might be a knuckle-dragging neanderthal, but he has a point when he tells Sumner it was rude to walk out during the pastor’s sermon. Of course, in real life he should not be brutalized for such boorishness, but in a sleazy exploitation film (which is really what the new Straw is) it is a close call.

There is no question Lurie is demonizing the gun-and-religion clinging Red-Staters, but at least he refrains from playing the race card in his Straw. Though savage, Venner and his crew are really not portrayed as racists, per se. In fact, they more or less respect the town’s African American lawman, Iraq War hero John Burke. Of course, as an authority figure, they still have problems with him.

At least Lurie gets down to business during the climatic siege, delivering the old school payback with efficient directness, though again he more or less replicates the methods of execution employed in the original film. He also includes the notorious rape scene as well, but the reactions of Kate Bosworth’s Amy Sumner are never ambiguous (indeed, it is hard to blame him for “wimping out” in this respect).

Marsden and Bosworth make a pretty dull, unlikable couple. Alexander Skarsgård is not a particularly flamboyant villain either, but at least he adds an intriguing dimension, hinting at Venner’s possible sense of remorse. Naturally, it is up to James Woods to ham it up something fierce as Coach Heddon, a mean drunk if ever there was one.

It is hard to understand why this film was produced. If Lurie wanted to make a southern fried grindhouse movie, he should have done so without invoking comparison to such a controversial (and superior) film. Faithfully violent but often outright silly, Lurie’s Straw is just about what you think it is. Not recommended (except perhaps as an ironic trip to the drive-in for fly-over country), it opens today (9/16) in several New York theaters, including the Regal Battery Park.