Jackpot! Hates Its Audience Almost As Much As It Hates Its Characters

Paul Feig’s latest, starring Awkwafina and John Cena, indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off. Photo: Daniel McFadden/AMAZON MGM STUDIOS

I’m predisposed to enjoy any film that starts with Dolly de Leon cattle-gunning Seann William Scott in the forehead, but the new Amazon Prime movie Jackpot! fails to live up to its promising opening minutes. Surprising, perhaps, as this picture comes from the generally reliable director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy) and stars the usually engaging Awkwafina and the always game John Cena. (Scott and de Leon, alas, are mere cameos.) Unfortunately, it also seems to play to these artists’ worst instincts — with laughless gags, action slapstick that relies more on speed than visual wit, and a nonsensical plot with an aggravating need to constantly explain itself.

Jackpot! takes place in a near future in which Los Angeles has instituted a giant lottery with one big twist: Once the winner is announced, anyone can kill them and claim the money for themselves. But they can’t shoot them with bullets. (Hence the cattle guns. Not to mention the baseball bats, knives, meat cleavers, axes, tasers, etc.) Awkwafina plays Katie Kim, a former commercial child star who has just returned to town after taking time off to care for her ailing mother. She has somehow remained blissfully unaware of this amazing development regarding the lottery, and she first discovers that she’s “won” right after an audition as a small army of lookalike blonde actresses suddenly starts trying to kill her with stilettos. The same building apparently also houses martial-arts and yoga studios, which leads to ever more ridiculous action shenanigans before the suited, musclebound Noel (Cena) materializes, seemingly out of nowhere, to protect her. Noel is a freelance bodyguard who specializes in keeping lottery winners safe, and soon enough he’s swirling Katie around like a human mallet, walloping waves of hapless assailants.

These initial scenes, with the clueless Katie wondering why everyone’s trying to kill her and Noel helping demolish her would-be murderers, do incorporate some fun stunts, which might lead you to think you’re watching a light, amiably dumb comedy. But as the story “develops,” it becomes clear that the filmmakers don’t have a lot of ideas here, save for occasional non sequitur jokes (some of them improvised, if the blooper reels over the closing credits are anything to go by) and constant shots of ordinary people suddenly pulling out weapons at the sight of Katie (a gag that stops being funny after maybe the seventh time it happens). Beyond that, it’s mostly just endless, incoherent scenes of poorly choreographed mayhem with brief time-outs for awkwardly placed and thinly written bits of emotional shading that somehow make the whole enterprise feel even more phony and cynical.

Yes, we’re supposed to grade these instantly forgotten, fly-by-night streaming comedies on some kind of unholy curve. After all, these movies are not meant to get you into theaters; they’re there to serve as background noise while you fold clothes or check sports scores or have meaningful conversations with your refrigerator. But Jackpot! is so shrill, so frantic that it doesn’t let you turn your mind off. Instead, it grates on the brain. For its story to work, everybody in the film must act like an imbecile. Katie is, per her backstory, ignorant of what’s going on; Noel is a dim-bulb straight man, a bruiser with a good heart and a perpetually glazed look on his face. The supporting characters, on the other hand, are insistently annoying — including Katie’s idiotic Airbnb host, Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), and her even more boneheaded boyfriend, DJ (Donald Elise Watkins). These are not untalented actors; it appears they’ve been directed to act this way. Interestingly, Simu Liu shows up as a skeezy tech bro with a high-end security company, and he’s the only one who provides some interesting layers to his repellent character.

The real problem with Jackpot! (aside from the inept direction, the unfunny script, and the irritating characters) is that the whole film indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Feig took a look at Mike Judge’s Idiocracy before tackling this one. But in Judge’s intentionally crass lament (which somehow becomes more prescient and troublesome by the day), our rampant national boorishness and stupidity was sort of the point. In Jackpot!, the potshots at the public at large are contrivances and conveniences — cheap shots designed to sell us on the film’s uninspired action high jinks and its clangingly dull comedy.