Just My Luck

(2006)  1/2 Pg-13
108 min. 20th Century Fox. Director: Donald Petrie. Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Samaire Armstrong, Bree Turner, Faizon Love.

Why does the new Lindsay Lohan picture have such a poo fixation? Just My Luck can't seem to go two minutes without a reference to feces, from the European-accented Tarot reader's exhortation "Holy crap" to the scene involving the visual cue of a mountainous pile of glopping "mud" upon which Lohan inevitably trips. Could it be that director Donald Petrie is Freudian slipping on his shitty material?

Just My Luck has the sort of awful script (by I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris, from a story credited to King and three more male writers) that awkwardly shoves its title into a line of dialogue. When Lohan's yuppie princess Ashley Albright demands her luck back from Tovah Feldshuh's Tarot reader, Ashley whines, "That is just my luck, okay?" But sadly, Ashley's moon is in Uranus, so she'll have to kiss twenty-one guys before she can get her luck back. There's something in Uranus, alright, but it ain't moonbeams.

In the kind of twinkly magic realism found only in bad movies and tween novellas, born-lucky PR gal Ashley trades luck with born-loser Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) in a fateful, masquerade-ball dance-floor clinch. Though upwardly and downwardly mobile career moves are a major concern, bad luck is mostly depicted as a series of slapstick annoyances (getting splashed by cars, imprinted with wet paint, and shat upon by birds). Good luck mostly means never having to lose in the lottery.

King and Harris can't make this stupid premise interesting. I'd even settle for entertaining, but all Petrie can muster are some wan, Lucy-esque antics for Lohan. Her utterly unlikeable character has been spoiled by success; she's a pampered dimwit who tries to wax a floor in stilletto heels. As for music promoter Jake, he's a boringly nice guy whose claim to fame and fortune (if his luck holds) is the Liverpudian rock quartet McFly. (The fictional, product-placed screen version of the band unaccountably seeks fame with only one song to show for themselves...how do they play a set?)

Don't expect any internal logic from Just My Luck, especially for the burning questions of why fate would single out these two dips, or how the residence of the "good luck" can satisfactorily be resolved. An even better question: who cares?

Share/bookmark: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Fark Furl Google Bookmarks Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo! My Web Permalink Permalink
Sponsored Links