“Jackpot!” (2024) Review

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There’s a barrier that Jackpot taps into in its attempts to wield dark comedy and slapstick action amid a dystopian setting of greed. Rather than offer anything wittingly wry on the topic, Paul Feig’s comedy seems less interested in cracking that divide but instead draws a silly face on its surface. To enjoy such a film relies on accepting this nightmare scenario uncritically, where late-stage capitalism is more of a thin lattice for lukewarm improv.

Set in 2030 Los Angeles, the city offers a lottery in which the winner is determined by who kills the person with the winning ticket. This idea has many issues, but the film tries to sweep all these problems under the rug. One stumbling way it does this is by having the underdog actress Katie (Awkwafina) utterly unaware of this development when she arrives in the city. There’s no time for her to question this unjust system that feels like an uninspired spin-off of The Purge. Not when people are trying to kill Katie when she accidentally enters and wins the lottery.

Katie’s only hope for survival is the bodyguard Noel (John Cena), who is working for a cut of Katie’s winnings. By the time they meet amid bashing heads and darting around streets in car chases, perhaps the film could’ve written itself. That might’ve been the case in a better-directed movie, but Feig once more relies on his comedic actors to make lemonade out of rocks, where more effort is put into the elaborate fight scenes than the dialogue.

The film might’ve been a hoot if there had been something more amusing to work with. For example, Katie’s clothes are soiled on the day of her audition, and she ends up wearing a golden ensemble. The best joke mustered from her wild clothing is that she looks like C3PO. Noel is obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the only amusing moment with this fan is when he fights to the tune of Partners in Kryme’s “Turtle Power.”

So little of this concept is questioned in the name of ho-hum comedic bits. Machine Gun Kelly plays himself in a soft cameo that would make The Simpsons blush. Simu Liu plays a rich jerk trying to con Katie out of her winnings and feels like a villain who should be questioned more. Instead, Liu plays more of an obligatory antagonist for being a jerk in a white suit than an embodiment of neoliberalism’s most toxic by-product. No politics, please, in this film, whose entire premise relies on wealth inequality and the inhuman depths of greed.

When the onslaught of scattershot and scatological jokes fails to land, the grosser nature of this idea starts to take hold. The safe route is taken of making everybody trying to kill Katie a greedy asshole who doesn’t need the money. Nobody ever stresses the problems they have and why they need to murder someone for an absurd amount of money. No more turmoil within this Los Angeles setting would suggest it, either. Even by the film’s end, when Katie wins the lottery (spoilers, I guess?), her attempts to use it for the betterment of the city are severely kneecapped when she also turns into a rich prick, sitting on a yacht and ordering dolphin sandwiches. The underdog defeats the rich asshole and, thus, becomes a rich asshole, a revelation that arrives with a shrug.

Jackpot is a massive misfire of a comedy for trying to drape vanilla slapstick silliness on its capitalist nightmare hellscape. It’s shocking, considering that Paul Feig had a decent mastery of humor and action with 2015’s Spy. That film worked because Feig’s focus on patriarchal systems and action movie cliches made the film work. With Jackpot, he’s out of his element, and his feminist jabs fall extra flat when his film seems almost entirely disinterested in its passive dystopian environment. Films about a lottery where people slaughter each other shouldn’t feel this boring and pointless, where even the presence of the absurd Murray Hill is wasted as the eccentric lottery host.