{"id":1493,"date":"2024-08-15T13:51:07","date_gmt":"2024-08-15T13:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/15\/jaclpot\/"},"modified":"2024-08-15T13:51:07","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T13:51:07","slug":"jaclpot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/15\/jaclpot\/","title":{"rendered":"Jaclpot!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c<\/em>Jackpot!\u201d\u00a0<\/em>is a trashy and repetitive action comedy about greed and bloodlust set\u00a0in a world full of people who are\u00a0proud to be awful.\u00a0Directed by Paul Feig (\u201cSpy\u201d), it’s set in near-future Los Angeles, which begins to seem like a statement in itself as the movie goes along. There\u2019s a statewide lottery. For some reason, the state government has decreed that citizens are permitted to hunt and kill winners to try and take their prize money. A handful of rules govern the hunt. One is, only those who\u2019ve purchased a ticket and lost the draw\u00a0can take part. Another rule is: no guns allowed. A third\u00a0is: the hunt can only go on for 24 hours. If the original winner has survived at the end of that period, they get to keep their winnings.<\/p>\n

Other than that, anything goes. Participants can use knives, clubs, broken bottles, bats, chains, rubber hoses, spears, curtain rods, mop handles, and presumably automobiles (though I don\u2019t recall anyone trying to run anyone down deliberately, which seems like a strange omission in retrospect). They can hunt alone or in groups, even very large groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Awkwafina plays the target of the latest hunt, Katie Kim, a former actress who just returned home from many years spent visiting her\u00a0dying mother in another state. Her dad died a while before. She didn\u2019t have a good relationship with either parent. We get a bit of detail about her personal life to explain why she doesn\u2019t know anything about the California state lottery turning into a murderous manhunt (she\u2019s been spending time with her mom; no, really, that\u2019s the reason) and also why she\u2019s worthy of our sympathy (beyond the fact that, like other past lottery winners, she doesn\u2019t deserve to be hunted like an animal; nobody does). Katie comes into her own winning ticket purely by accident and doesn\u2019t realize she has it until her number comes up during an audition (which she doesn\u2019t get) and everybody starts looking at her like a cartoon wolf staring at a sheep and imagining lamb chops.<\/p>\n

An entire economy seems to have grown up around the lottery hunt, though the movie only zeros in on one part: the security experts who locate winners and offer them protection from harm in exchange for a cut of their fortune. John Cena plays one such security guard, a lovable bruiser named Noel. He used to work for a very successful lottery security company run by a snotty badass named Louie Lewis (Simu Liu). He saves Katie from death after the audition, when everyone in the building, including other actresses and a gymnasium full of karate students, have turned on her. She studied stage fighting but didn\u2019t learn a lot. Her instincts are good, but she lacks the moves to survive. Without Noel, she\u2019d be dead meat. And without Katie, Noel would be just another square-jawed he-man. (He\u2019s got a backstory, of course, which Katie will gradually pry out of him.)<\/p>\n

Written by Rob Yescombe, whose prior work was mainly on video games, \u201cJackpot!\u201d doesn\u2019t make a lick of real-world sense, and it\u2019s not supposed to. It has a video game-like repetitiousness and gradual escalation, leading to a Big Boss showdown. There\u2019s a lot of obviously improvised comedy that sometimes lands but more often feels like somebody filmed the exercises in a comedy performance workshop.\u00a0It\u2019s all in service of a movie that\u2019s\u00a0more half-baked goof than full-blown satire.<\/p>\n

And it seems committed to not investigating the deeper implications of the scenario it\u2019s presenting, in which the lottery hunt is the logical outgrowth of a society that seems to have completely given up on modeling decent values and has decided instead to monetize the worst human behavior. When Katie rents a tiny room from a website and realizes when she gets there that it doesn\u2019t look anything like the pictures online, the young woman who rents it, appropriately named Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), chirps \u201cwe used fake photos, because who\u2019s gonna stay here if we don\u2019t?\u201d Early in the movie, Katie sees a hateful stage dad loudly and profanely griping about his young daughter, who just failed an audition. \u201cSorry for all the bad words,\u201d he tells the kid. \u201cI only curse when your mom\u2019s being a f\u2014–g b\u2014h.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cJackpot!\u201d\u00a0is a trashy and repetitive action comedy about greed and bloodlust set\u00a0in a world full of people who are\u00a0proud to be awful.\u00a0Directed by Paul Feig (\u201cSpy\u201d), it’s set in near-future Los Angeles, which begins to seem like a statement in itself as the movie goes along. There\u2019s a statewide lottery. For some reason, the state …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,38,33],"class_list":["post-1493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-amazon-prime","tag-comedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}