I approached seeing director Rod Davis Lurie‘s new WWII-set film Lucky Strike with a little apprehension because at this point I had a hard time imagining seeing another movie set during this war of wars that could possibly feel like something I hadn’t already seen. From all those films actually made while it was going on to the countless numbers released since, hasn’t every angle been covered, every story been told? Seeing Lucky Strike I realized, to paraphrase a line from the opening of each episode of a certain ’50s TV series, “There are eight million stories in the naked city, this has been one of them.”
So yes, there are probably eight million stories in war, and yes this is one of them, but it turns out to be a damn good one, a riveting thriller of a U.S. captain alone and fighting to simply stay alive. And like some of my favorite less-heralded war movies like Pork Chop Hill with Gregory Peck and The Mountain Road with James Stewart, Lucky Strike knows to keep a narrow focus on the singular mission, a seemingly simple one in this case set during the infamous Battle of the Bulge toward the end of WWII. A group of Army soldiers is ordered to block a key road in Belgium to thwart the menacing Nazi Panzer army, but a broken-down truck and the location become problematic and they come under fire, one by one downed by the enemy until only an injured Captain Castle (Scott Eastwood, commanding the screen in a strong performance) is left. He must survive on his own in a treacherous area, armed with a Motorola SCR-300 radio, a new invention made available only in the waning days of the war that becomes his life raft, a way to communicate with the base and find his way back against all odds.
We see a preview of the danger in the area in the film’s opening sequence in which a group of soldiers is mowed down by German fire. That scene switches to a more peaceful setting as Castle arrives to the apartment of Mrs. Caldwell (a wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) for a post-war visit and, as we will see at film’s end, a special gift. He begins to tell his story to her, and we flash back to what this is all about, knowing obviously he did survive– but it is how he did it, and the beginnings of life-saving modern technology in combat that made all the difference. Usually in every war movie I see it is a gun that is indispensable, but here it’s a radio as he uses it to track his progress back to his base at Elsenborn several miles away.
Along this journey, Lurie puts us right in the middle of the nightmare as Castle must navigate the treacherous terrain where he could be caught at any point, a cat-and-mouse game with high stakes for this one man, if not the war itself, which often is the bigger picture we see in these films depicting courageous heroism. Here it is simply to survive another day.
From this point the story becomes a bit more episodic. Castle comes upon a Belgium farm house and a mother and daughter who help to mend his wounded leg when a group of Nazis arrive and he has to go into action. The mother is killed, and the daughter traumatized. One scene has him on a battlefield playing dead with a Nazi urinating on what he thinks is just another corpse, and another lifeless body is next to him suddenly opening his eyes and about to give up the ghost. The latter sequence is edge-of-your-seat stuff, expertly shot with terrified eye-to-eye closeups. An exciting scene ramps up the action as Castle commandeers a German tank and drives it over a cliff. A fascinating encounter late in the film has him coming upon another American soldier with whom he bonds until the cigarette the man tosses away provides a signal that he might not be who he says he is. The film’s title comes into play here in a crucial way.
Lurie, a West Point graduate and Army veteran, certainly knows his way around this genre. Lucky Strike follows his exceptional and harrowing Afghanistan-set 2019 film The Outpost, which also starred Eastwood in the adaptation of CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s best-selling account of the Battle of Kamdesh. Here, along with his co-writer Mark Frydman, Lurie finds his way into a very human tale of war, one said to be inspired by a true story Frydman heard firsthand years ago and had never forgotten. It is one person’s private hell of war and the special kind of will and grit it takes to survive. It also is about the guilt you can’t leave behind when you find you are the only one in your company who did. And it is about the singular heroism that can be defined in many different ways, small and large, in and out of the theater of war. This takes us back to that visit at the beginning of the film to Mrs. Caldwell and her mysterious connection to the reason this man is even still alive to share his gratitude to her.
Yes, Lucky Strike is one of those “eight million stories” of war but a quietly powerful and ultimately moving one well worth telling.
Producers are Frydman, Lurie, Jonathan Yunger, Les Weldon, and Yariv Lerner
Title: Lucky Strike
Distributor: Roadside Attractions
Release date: June 26, 2026
Director: Rod Davis Lurie
Screenwriters: Marc Frydman and Rod Davis Lurie
Cast: Scott Eastwood, Colin Hanks, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Taylor John Smith, Caroline Piette, Hazel Rogers. Kwame Patterson
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr, 42 mins
English (US) ·