Jackpot! Review

Jackpot!–note the exclamation point–is the new Paul Feig movie that debuted recently on Amazon Prime. It tells the story of Katie Kim (Awkwafina), a one-time child actress who is returning to Los Angeles after the death of her mother. Her mom and she loved Hollywood and watching movies together, so to honor her, Katie is back to trying to make it as an actress.

Unfortunately, she is doing so in the far off year 2030 where economic and social collapse has really taken its toll on the state of California. To combat this, they have instituted a new lottery system. It’s the biggest and most valuable lottery ever devised, but it comes with a caveat: the winner of the drawing has to make it to sundown on the day they win.

Sounds easy, right? Well, not when the residents of LA are trying to legally kill you and claim your prize as their own. Katie is actually blissfully unaware of the lottery game, but she secures a ticket by accident when she has to borrow clothes from her AirBnB hostess.

Of course, Katie “wins” this lottery, and suddenly everyone she meets is trying to kill her. Enter: Noel (John Cena), an upstanding man who runs a protection business for lottery winners where he vows to keep them alive until sundown for just 10% of their winnings.

So it’s Katie and Noel against what feels like the world, with the end of the day several hours away. Can they make it?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ I’ve got to knock the cast list out of the way first here. When I had heard that John Cena, Awkwafina, and Simu Liu were all doing a movie together, I knew I had to be there, as I’m a big fan of all three.

I think Awkwafina is flawless, though I know she is divisive in a lot of circles. I love her delivery and her physical comedy, and I know from pictures like The Farewell and Quiz Lady that she is an overall solid actress, as well. She is her typical bombastic, exaggerated self here. So that might not be an Up for everyone, but it is for me.

Her Shang-Chi co-star Simu Liu joins her again here, and I guess that, since a sequel to that movie is not exactly imminent, I’ll take what I can get here. Liu is having a ton of fun chewing the scenery in a villainous turn in this movie, and he gets to have some good action sequences with John Cena.

Speaking of the leader of the Cenation, he’s here doing a spin on his typical comedy shtick. I do feel like John continues to pigeon-hole himself in this repeating role of “vulgar funny guy with a heart of gold”, but he continues to excel at it, so who can be mad at him?

The movie also starts off with a cameo from Sean William Scott who exits the film too quickly for my tastes but is a joy while he’s on screen. Too bad we don’t see him interact with any of the other three.

So yeah, I adored the cast in this, though only Liu is doing anything even a little out of his wheelhouse.

+ The soundtrack to Jackpot! is full of bangers, and they are used very well by director Paul Feig to enhance the goings-on on screen. It’s an eclectic mix of bands featuring the likes of The Beach Boys, The Beastie Boys, Weezer, LMFAO, Logic, The Spice Girls, and more.

The songs all seem to be particularly well chosen for how they will match up with moments in the flick, and I’m not going to lie… I’d have bought this CD back in the day when buying CDs was still a thing we did. Excellent musical decisions for this one!

Additionally, as a tangentially related Half-An-Up: The action sequences are pretty good for a movie skating by on being a Comedy, and the background soundtrack helps a lot with that.

– The movie fails to really explain multiple major aspects of the plot, the most noteworthy of which being: who on Earth would sign up for this lottery? If you win, that’s great, sure, but you seem almost certain to die if you do. So why bother? It’s a wild concept that anyone would buy a ticket for this voluntarily, and it makes sense that Katie only gets roped into it by complete accident.

We’re also told that the lottery was instituted to assist with a devastated economy, and I get the How’s and Why’s of that on a small scale, but giving away almost 4 billion dollars can’t be THAT great for the state. It reminded me of how I felt with The Purge movies: the film tells us “The government did this nonsense thing to fix it’s problems”, but they never explain exactly how the strange dystopian idea is actually making anything better.

Actually, given that both movies involve making murder temporarily legal, this has oddly more in common with The Purge than I would have first thought.

– Not only is Awkwafina a divider of popular opinions, so is the director Paul Feig. And while I’m mostly indifferent to his work at worst, I had to admit that the humor in Jackpot! was extremely hit or miss. And most of what worked was because of the phenomenal delivery of Cena or Awkwafina.

There were no big belly laughs that I found here, but I did sensibly chuckle a few times. I just got the feeling that the movie thought it was going to be funnier than it actually is. The writing is mediocre, and that’s not helped by the aforementioned lack of care in going into detail on the plot.

6.5

The final score: review Average

The 411

Your mileage for Jackpot! is going to come down to your tolerance to Awkwafina and, to a lesser extent, John Cena. And admittedly, mine is very high for each of them, to the point where they were easily the best part of the film to me. The action is quite good and outpaces the funniness by a bit. This isn’t going to be on many folks’ Top Ten lists at the end of the year, but it’s a quality watch for free on Amazon.