It’s the year 2030 in Los Angeles, and a new, vicious game is afoot. The California Grand Lottery, started in response to the Great Depression of 2026, tantalises cash-strapped citizens with hope via a mega-billions jackpot. The catch? If you win, you have to survive until sundown; anyone who kills you – and they have your location – gets your money. Also, no one can use guns.
There are some other stipulations hastily explained in Jackpot!, an Amazon MGM Studios production that, from the jump, struggles to infuse incredibly bleak conditions with lighthearted action humour. LA is beset by worse, though thinly sketched, economic inequality – people use flip phones now, TV anchors cheer a dozen new billionaires, an unhoused couple cooks hotdogs at a camp by a fancy cafe (gasp!). Everyone is perfectly comfortable with murderous zeal for money and ready to kill the moment the winner is announced. “Some people call it dystopian,” a title card reads, “but those people are no fun.”
Well, call me no fun then. Despite the action-comedy bona fides of director Paul Feig, helmer of the far more entertaining Bridesmaids and Spy, and the comedic chops of Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot! is an unsteady balance of dark and light, a tinny and discordant mishmash of stunts, ridiculous characters, ludicrous stakes and attempts at zeitgeist. It has the flat, cheap hallmark of something all too clearly destined for streaming. It is more frustrating than entertaining for its squandering of talent, from Feig down to a single scene with the infinitely more-interesting-than-this Dolly de Leon.
It’s true, too, of Awkwafina and Cena who tangibly strain to cast sparks in this flimsy would-be dystopia. Perhaps still best known for her sidekick role in Crazy Rich Asians, Awkafina plays Katie Kim, a former child commercial star attempting to make it again in LA after years caring for her late mother. Katie’s luck is bad: a kindly woman on the bus (Girls’s Becky Ann Baker) steals her watch, she bombs an audition, she has the worst Airbnb hosts alive (Ayden Mayeri and Donald Elise Watkins, playing dialled-up caricatures). That is, until she accidentally enters and wins the $3+ billion jackpot, immediately blasting all the other contestants – which is everyone in the greater Los Angeles area, of course – with her name, photo and location. You better believe there’s a bit about taking the theatre idiom “break a leg” too seriously.
Feig is at his best when the action heats up, and particularly when it’s centred on Cena as Noel Cassidy, an amateur lottery protection agent who forms a sweet bond with the understandably distrustful Katie. A WWE star turned actor, Cena’s speciality remains fight choreography with a chipper, theatrical edge, and to the extent Jackpot! gets going, it’s when Cassidy is at the wheel, somehow both hyper-competent and pathetically put-upon. Awkwafina gets most of the film’s few good lines – usually at Cena’s expense (“you look like a bulldog that a witch cast a spell on and turned into a human”) – but Katie’s near-constant death battle mostly keeps her performance in a hammy, loud, grating register of panic.
Still, there’s enough warmth to Katie and Neal’s mutual respect and quick loyalty to power through some inane circumstances: a pit stop at Machine Gun Kelly’s panic room, a standoff with Noel’s former mercenary associate turned filthy rich lottery protector Louis Lewis, played with relish by Simu Liu. If you are into men ranting about LaCroix flavours between punches or the chance to see Cena take on four guys while tied to a chair and rapping the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack, then maybe there are some laughs here for you.
But for me, there’s a fine line between time-wasting stupid and fun-stupid, and Jackpot! plays for the latter while landing mostly in the former. (Though for the record, I will always appreciate Cena’s gameness for any project, no matter the quality; I cannot say the same for Britney Spears’s former fiance Sam Asghari, who gets actual lines as one of Louis’s hired guns.) Jackpot! is an unwieldy product – the dystopian buy-in too steep, the look too sterile, the silly bits jarring rather than disarming, the action occasionally choppy. To be fair, it is a miracle that any movie gets all its disparate elements (and budget) to cohere into something smooth, moving, funny. Getting that right with chemistry to boot is like winning the lottery. Not every movie can be so lucky.
• Jackpot! is on Prime Video from 15 August.
