‘Lucky’ Review: Anya Taylor-Joy Runs for Her Life in Apple TV+’s Slick Crime Thriller

Always in motion. That’s how Lucky operates: sprinting from the FBI and the mob on her tail, hunting for the partner who ran off with their money, and staying alive on nothing but street smarts and a working knowledge of the underworld’s tricks. That’s the engine of the series loosely adapted from Marissa Stapley’s Lucky and centered on a young woman—played by Anya Taylor-Joy—trying to survive whatever the world (and the business she’s entangled in) throws at her. It won’t be easy, obviously, but that escalating chain of dangers is precisely what powers this slick, highly watchable show, executive produced by the Argentine-born actress herself.

There are plenty of differences between the book and the series (best left unsaid to avoid spoilers), but what remains intact is its universe, its premise, and—most importantly—its core characters and conflicts. The story drops us in medias res, mid-chaos, and it takes a beat to map out all the moving parts circling the action. Written by Jonathan Tropper (also behind Your Friends & Neighbors), the show retains the novel’s multi-timeline structure, weaving the present with frequent flashbacks that chart the life of Lucky—born Luciana Armstrong.

It all kicks off in a Las Vegas casino hotel, where Lucky and her husband Cary (Drew Starkey) celebrate what appears to be a multi-million-dollar heist. After one too many drinks and a romantic night—complete with talk of disappearing to some Caribbean idyll—she wakes up to find Cary gone. So is the money. Then things get worse: the FBI storms the hotel. Led by the relentless Agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), they know exactly who they’re after. Lucky, meanwhile, has neither the cash nor any clue what happened to it. So she runs.

That’s just one problem. A familiar, distinctly unfriendly face also shows up: Dutch (Clifton Collins Jr.), effectively the enforcer for Priscilla (Annette Bening), a mobster who’s clearly connected to the missing money. Lucky’s only—limited—ally is her father, John (Timothy Olyphant), but he’s in prison and can offer little more than advice. From there, Lucky leans on everything she learned growing up with him—a seasoned con man who trained her early in the art of deception—to stay one step ahead. It’s a mix of ingenuity, survival instinct, and, yes, a fair amount of luck (and a script that tends to stack the deck in her favor).

Across seven episodes, the show tracks her constant improvisation: close calls, narrow escapes, and increasingly elaborate cons as she searches for her husband and the missing money while dodging both the FBI and the mob. There’s an action-driven pulse that occasionally recalls The Fugitive, but the emotional core lies in Lucky’s seemingly warm yet fundamentally fraught relationship with her father. Meanwhile, the mob storyline grows more intricate with the arrival of another heavy hitter, Whittaker (William Fichtner), whose past ties to Priscilla, Dutch, John, and Cary deepen the web—and raise the stakes.

Like Your Friends & Neighbors, Tropper’s earlier show, Lucky hinges on a morally compromised protagonist the audience is meant to root for—someone in over their head, scrambling to find a way out. At its core is Lucky’s desire to leave that life behind, even as she remains trapped in a chain of consequences she can’t quite break. The script does lean heavily on coincidence—along with a slightly hard-to-buy premise that someone as distinctive-looking as Taylor-Joy could pass unnoticed with a new haircut and dye job—and it piles up its share of last-second escapes and narrative contrivances. Still, it never quite crosses the line into implausibility beyond what’s standard for this kind of long-form thriller.

There’s also a faintly retro feel to the series, evoking classic procedural TV and, more recently, Poker Face with Natasha Lyonne. For much of its run, it embraces an episodic rhythm, with Lucky facing a new predicament each week—closer, in that sense, to the 1960s version of The Fugitive than to its 1993 film adaptation. Mid-season, that structure settles into something more serialized, digging deeper into the characters’ pasts and long-standing relationships. Bening, in particular, stands out as a mob boss who’s both formidable and unexpectedly fragile.

Taylor-Joy may not quite sell the physical toll of surviving so many brutal encounters—bloodied but largely unscathed—but she finds a convincing angle into the character, emphasizing intelligence and quick thinking over force. Supported by Bening, Olyphant, Ellis-Taylor, and Fichtner, she anchors a story whose plausibility often hangs by a thread. It’s that ensemble strength that ultimately carries Lucky through the inherent challenges of adaptation. Marketed as a miniseries, it leaves open the question of whether it truly ends here—especially given how much of the novel it leaves aside. If it does, it lands cleanly. If not, there’s enough momentum—and enough left in Lucky’s tank—to keep it going.