Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

After falling prey to a tax scam, reformed gambler Lucky goes through increasingly desperate actions to try and make ends meet for his struggling family. 

So when we meet Lucky (Terry Chen), he’s already or more accurately still in debt up to his eyeballs, behind on payments for everything from his failing electronics repair stores’ taxes, to his daughter Jenny’s (Summer Ly) Chinese-identity school tuition payments, and oh so many things between. The opening scene of the film shows Lucky outright lying about why he needs to borrow money from his friend and financial aid Darren (Andrew Phung) yet again, and makes it quite clear that Lucky is nursing his gambling addiction rather than being reformed from it. Lucky goes through this eternal circle jerk of robbing-peter-to-pay-paul nonsense, even going so far as to borrow (and by this we mean steal) from his older daughter Grace’s several fundage hiding places as his debts mount in an uncontrollable tower of Jenga fashion. Which means, yes, this is all going to come tumbling down in a rather spectacular way at some point, it’s just a matter of time. 

Lucky’s elder daughter Grace (Connie Miu) is preparing to take her last, and seriously the hardest one, college exam before her graduation, and the pressure is pretty harsh. Grace would love nothing more than to go off to another country with her boyfriend Colt (Austyn Van de Camp) after graduation for some well-earned R&R, but she simply can’t afford it. If Grace can keep her grades up and stay on the Deans’ list and get an excellent grade on her final exam, there’s a cash prize of some $5,000, and of course Grace and her whole family could use that. Grace is well aware of her fathers increasing money troubles and often offers him money, either from her pitiful savings or her job in a department store, which is more often than not refused. Because somehow in Lucky’s mind it would be wrong to take from his eldest when she offers with an open hand, yet he’s still able to take money from her hidey-holes without saying anything to her as the movie trudges on. And in keeping with her fathers demonstration of underhanded tactics to get the job done, as the pressure becomes unbearable, Grace resorts to attempting to cheat during her final exam, which just doesn’t help anything. 

Lucky’s wife Noel (Olivia Cheng) runs a tailoring shop, has wealthy clients and makes clothes at home as a side gig, being well aware of Lucky’s unfortunate money-losing proclivities. We the audience get the feeling Lucky has pulled these sort of despicable actions before, at the height, or depths, of his gambling addiction, and his wife sure doesn’t want to let that happen again. But the more Noel tries to monitor her husbands spending and be involved in the household finances, the more Lucky gets resentful of his own wife clearly acting as though she doesn’t trust him with the responsibility of running his own house. And well she shouldn’t. 

Though Noel herself isn’t without temptations to the world of possible ways to garner money illegally either. When a wealthy client leaves behind an obviously expensive watch at her tailor shop, Noel goes to have it appraised, and from the conversation between her and her jeweler pal, we get the impression Noel has done this or something like it before. Then again, if her own husband wasn’t running around gambling away the family funds, she wouldn’t have to consider such felonious actions. And when Lucky finds the watch in a hidey-hole in the house when he was going around snatching up hidden funds, he of course immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion that his wife is having an affair, which just makes things so much worse. 

So Lucky got scammed by a fake tax agent, I didn’t even know that was a thing, and now he’s running around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to get money to pay the actual real tax agent to keep his electronics repair store from being shut entirely, along with so many other debts. And falling back into the only thing that he seems to think he was ever actually good at, Lucky contacts an old friend for information on local private poker games, where he can in theory score big asafp. 

But this is the moment, the dawning of revelation, as Lucky finds himself sitting there in someone’s kitchen among other desperate strangers, after paying a $10,000 buy-in for a private poker game, and it really does look Lucky’s going to have a minor miracle from the cards, Lucky does something incredible – he folds. Instead of going to jail for failure to pay owed debts or some other loud consequence, Lucky finds himself quietly awed by the mess he’s gotten himself and his family into, and opts to finally do the right thing, and just walk away. 

Unfortunately, this action, while it might be cathartic for Lucky’s soul, does little to help his debts or his family, especially when Lucky makes the quiet confession to his beleaguered wife that yes, he’s gambling again, and she kicks him out. Her daughters at this point understand everything going on and have told Noel flat to not stay with him over some sentimental notion of shielding them, so it’s the three ladies of the shreds of Lucky’s family life together in the end. Lucky is separated from his family, but welcomed gently by Noel and even his daughters when he comes to visit them, and though reconciliation seems unlikely, at least Lucky isn’t cut out entirely. Given all the troubling things Lucky’s done up to this point, he really should consider himself lucky that his whole family is quite forgiving, even now.