'O Lucky Man!' was hit-or-miss for me, and it's my least favorite film from Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy. The songs by Alan Price have dated poorly, I think, in the same way that the Cat Stevens music from 'Harold and Maude' has. It was a substantial distraction, given that it appears quite often in Greek Chorus style and contributes a lot to the tone of the movie.
Malcolm McDowell's Mick Travis character is the same person in name only, across the trilogy (which begins with 'If...' and ends with the underrated 'Britannia Hospital'). His smiling, vacant coffee salesman here seems to have little to do with the angry youth from the first film, and despite the epic length of 'O Lucky Man!,' the movie is an episodic satire without much resonance. It's very funny, at times -- my favorite sequence concerned a medical experiment for which McDowell is offered money -- and highly ambitious, superficially similar in some ways to 'A Clockwork Orange,' but in the end, it's too broad, aims at too many targets, and doesn't have the cinematic flair to match the energy of its satirical free-for-all.
Malcolm McDowell's Mick Travis character is the same person in name only, across the trilogy (which begins with 'If...' and ends with the underrated 'Britannia Hospital'). His smiling, vacant coffee salesman here seems to have little to do with the angry youth from the first film, and despite the epic length of 'O Lucky Man!,' the movie is an episodic satire without much resonance. It's very funny, at times -- my favorite sequence concerned a medical experiment for which McDowell is offered money -- and highly ambitious, superficially similar in some ways to 'A Clockwork Orange,' but in the end, it's too broad, aims at too many targets, and doesn't have the cinematic flair to match the energy of its satirical free-for-all.