I'm going with one out of five for director Soham Shah's Luck: Masand's movie review

Luck

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Imran Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Ravi Kissen, Shruti Haasan, Chitrashi Rawat

Direction: Soham Shah

Now here's the thing about action films. Most of them aren't particularly smart, but you're willing to overlook that if they make for a dramatic and thrilling experience. The problem with Luck, which opens at cinemas this weekend, is that it's neither smart nor spectacular.

Sanjay Dutt stars as Musa, a gambling kingpin who's made a fortune in human betting. His faithful henchman Tamang (played by Danny Denzongpa) is entrusted the job of travelling the world and recruiting the luckiest people he can find to participate in a Fear Factor-style series of dangerous challenges, while loaded gamblers place bets on them.

Lured by the promise of a fat cash prize to the one who survives all challenges, a motley bunch of misfits – including Imran Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Ravi Kissen, Shruti Haasan, Chitrashi Rawat, and a handful of your staple foreign extras from Colaba Causeway – volunteer to jump off helicopters and enter shark-infested waters.

Borrowing his premise and key scenes quite liberally from a handful of films including Spanish thriller Intacto, French cult-favorite 13 Tzameti and Hollywood B-movie The Condemned, writer-director Soham Shah delivers a mangled mess of a picture that fails to engage because the characters are all stereotypes and you really couldn't care less if they lost their lives in those dangerous stunts.

To be honest, I can think of many reasons why Luck is a dumb film, and chief among them is the fact that there's more bak-bak than dishoom-dishoom, even though it pretends to be an action-adventure. What's worse, every single character in Luck speaks alike, rattling off metaphors, using the third-person and generally dishing out the kind of filmi punchlines that went out in the eighties.

The incredibly gifted Danny Denzongpa is saddled with the film's corniest lines including my personal favourite, a dialogue he delivers to a morose Imran Khan: "Laxmi tujhe teeka lagane aayi hai and tu eid ka chaand bana hua hai." It's priceless, and the film is packed with such gems.

The action scenes are all designed to look so cool, there's no nail-biting tension or even a hint of realism when the characters risk their lives in those dare-devil stunts. In all fairness, only one sequence grabs your attention – the film's opening set-piece in which Sanjay Dutt and a handful of others run blindfolded across railway tracks, dodging oncoming trains is a scene to behold.

Constructed from a screenplay that relies too heavily on coincidences to take the narrative forward, Luck is ultimately a tiring watch. Of the cast, only Ravi Kissen succeeds in making a real flesh-and-blood character out of his loosely written part, and Mithun Chakraborty and Chitrashi Rawat do the best they can with their half-baked roles. Imran Khan can't rise above the flawed material which doesn't allow him scope to do more than arch his brows, and camera-friendly newcomer Shruti Haasan delivers dialogue with deadpan expressions.

Yet it must be said that at least each of them tries. Unlike Sanjay Dutt, who sleepwalks through his scenes again, without making the slightest visible effort to contribute anything of consequence to the film.

Luck is often unintentionally hilarious for the clunky dialogue, and particularly for the ridiculous climax scene which is unquestionably the silliest you've seen in years.

I'm going with one out of five for director Soham Shah's Luck. Indeed only a stroke of good fortune could save this one.