For a long time, I thought of the writer-director Rod Lurie as an interesting and ambitious creator of topical drama — hot-button political films like “Deterrence” (1999) and “The Contender” (2000), the trenchant Valerie Plame muckraker “Nothing but the Truth” (2008), the misfired remake of “Straw Dogs” (2011). But Lurie, it’s fair to say, now has two filmmaking identities. There’s the middlebrow dramatist, and there’s the director of hot-wire combat spectacle who first emerged, in 2019, with “The Outpost,” an Afghanistan War drama that was one of most riveting and authentic movies about the experience of war in the post-9/11 world. Lurie is a U.S. Army veteran, and “The Outpost” brought him to a new peak as a filmmaker.
So when I learned that his new movie, “Lucky Strike,” is a combat thriller set during World War II, I was primed for more of the new Rod Lurie (and, in fact, he has even tweaked his name, now billing himself as Rod Davis Lurie). For a while, “Lucky Strike” feels like a film by the director of “The Outpost.” Scott Eastwood, with his chiseled, thin-lipped echo of his father’s squinty mystique (though Scott is like a more affable version of Clint), plays Capt. Castle, a soldier who was eligible for a deferment — due to his stateside work as an engineer — but enlisted anyway. It’s December 1944, in the Ardennes forest in Belgium (a pivot-point battle locale during WWII), and Castle is ordered to lead half a dozen of his men to a destination several hours away from base camp, where they’re to block a key road with explosives. They’re driving a faulty truck, which they’re forced to abandon, and after reaching the locale on foot they begin the job of booby-trapping it.
