“Just My Luck”: Dumber for having seen this

Thu, 05/18/2006 - 2:17pm
By: Michael Boylan

I’ll admit it. I’ve seen just about every Lindsay Lohan movie out there, from the surprisingly good “Freaky Friday” and “Mean Girls” to the really bad “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” Why have I watched these movies? I am married and sometimes a man has to watch what his wife is watching. O.K. and sometimes watching one of these movies might have been my idea. Was “Just My Luck,” my idea? Well, I did ask Sabine if she wanted to go with me, but it would have been great if “The Da Vinci Code” came out a week earlier.

Anyway, Lindsay Lohan is growing up and gone are the days of movies where Lohan is playing a high school student. Now, she is a working girl - not that kind of working girl - a real working girl, someone who works in PR in New York and has an office and meetings, etc. Her character, Ashley, is also incredibly lucky. Rain stops when she leaves her fabulous apartment, she is constantly finding money and meeting cute boys, er, men. Her luck changes though when she kisses a mysterious stranger at a party; she gets his bad luck and he gets her good luck. She figures out what happened but, not knowing who he is, kisses a ton of boys, er men, trying to get her luck back.

I know. Ewww.

The guy she did kiss was a lovable loser named Jake, who is a manager for a band called McFly, while also serving as a janitor at a bowling alley. When he gets the good luck, the band’s career takes off quickly - really too quickly to be plausible - and he gets a cool apartment, sexy girlfriends, etc. After reuniting with Ashley and them falling for each other, the luck transfers once again and Ashley must decide what to do - keep her good luck or give it back to Jake.

“Just My Luck” is a romantic comedy that goes really light on the comedy. I swear I didn’t laugh for the first 30 minutes. Things picked up slightly when Ashley started her run of bad luck, but the last 20 minutes of the film lagged. The movie is 103 minutes long and there are problems with over half of that time, especially when you figure in numerous scenes of the band playing music. The music isn’t bad, but it isn’t like one is witnessing the birth of the next Beatles either, which is practically what the movie is implying. What group can turn around and sell out a venue with close to tens of thousands of seats in a matter of weeks after their first single gets a bit of airplay?

Lohan is a decent leading lady - she’s attractive and charming - but this movie doesn’t do her any favors. The script is shallow and the characters are too boring to even be considered one dimensional. Chris Pine recalls a young Greg Kinnear in his performance as Jake and was a serviceable leading man, but this isn’t a star-making turn either. The rest of the cast is somewhere between mediocre and unsettling. Take Ashley’s friends, played by Samaire Armstrong and Bree Turner, for instance. We never understand just why these girls are friends in the first place and while both are attractive, neither girl seems to be anything more than along for the ride. The problem could be that both of these actresses are over six years older than Lohan and it often feels like even more. Maybe it’s just me, but Turner rubbed me the wrong way in more than one scene.

“Just My Luck” is the type of movie that when it comes on USA some rainy Sunday four or five years in the future, you will watch it while folding laundry, talking on the phone and doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. When it ends, you will change the channel and move on with your life, likely forgetting character’s names by dinner time. It isn’t a bad movie, per se, but it is one that Lohan should try to distance from her canon of work. I’m sure this summer’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” directed by Robert Altman, will help.

*1/2

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