‘Jackpot!’ Review: John Cena and Awkwafina Go for Broke in Paul Feig’s Action-Comedy

The Big Picture

• In
  Jackpot!
  , a new lottery in a dystopian L.A. requires the winner to stay alive until sundown while they are hunted by other ticket holders.
• The film blends a dark concept with crass comedy, featuring juvenile sex jokes, pop-culture references, and slapstick action sequences.
• Despite the on-paper appealing casting of Awkwafina and John Cena,
  Jackpot!
  fails to deliver, offering few laughs and a nonsensical storyline.

In the Prime Video film Jackpot!, the state of California implements a new kind of lottery where the winner makes a life-changing amount of cash, but only if they can stay alive within the borders of Los Angeles until sundown. The twist is that every other ticket holder can still claim the jackpot for themselves if they can manage to kill the winner within that time frame, turning each lotto drawing into a crazed, city-wide manhunt. Set in the 2030s, when the U.S. economy is worse than ever and homeless camps litter the streets, Jackpot! has a logline that sounds like it should come from a new Purge sequel or maybe a low-budget thriller that finally draws John Carpenter out of retirement. Instead, it arrives as a loud, crass, and deeply unfunny comedy courtesy of Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters (2016) director Paul Feig. It’s tough to recall another recent example where a filmmaker and his material are so disastrously mismatched, and the end result is catastrophic for everyone involved.

What Is ‘Jackpot!’ About

In Jackpot!, Awkwafina plays Katie Kim, a former child actor who returns to California to have another go at a Hollywood career after her ailing mother, who she had been caring for back in Michigan, passes away. In the first of the film’s many senseless contrivances, Katie isn’t even aware that the state has a new kind of lottery that activates the bloodlust of nearly all of Los Angeles, so she’s completely befuddled when she accidentally activates a ticket she finds in a borrowed piece of clothing, is declared the winner, and suddenly finds herself being attacked by almost every person she comes in contact with. (All assaults are up close and personal as guns are banned by the lottery’s rules.) One of the few people not trying to kill her is John Cena‘s Noel, a “protection agent” who will work to keep her alive until sundown for a standard 10 percent of her winnings. A very confused Katie is reluctant to accept his offer at first but eventually comes to rely on Noel, especially once a bigger, shadier, and much more corporate protection agency, led by an old military buddy of Noel’s played by Simu Liu, is drawn into their mad scramble for riches.

Based on that summation, you might assume that Jackpot! turns into a bloody gorefest, but you’d be wrong. The movie states its intentions in the first few moments, when the on-screen text that establishes the film’s universe and rules ends with: “Some people call it dystopian. But those people are no fun.” Working from a script by Rob Yescombe, Feig severely downplays the violent implications of the story to instead tell a light Hollywood satire stuffed with jokes that range from terrible (there’s a character who’s a deejay named DJ) to a lifeforce-draining level of dreadful. At one point, Machine Gun Kelly, seemingly just playing his current-day self even though the movie is set at least six years into the future, mistakenly thinks Cena wants to have sex with him and says, “You would turn my asshole into the Eye of Sauron. So let’s not go on that fellowship of my ring.”

An end-of-movie blooper reel reveals that other equally bad options were considered for that retort, while also proving that you can’t get away from Jackpot!‘s juvenile sex jokes even once you’ve suffered through to the credits. Additionally, there are fart jokes, shart jokes, the insinuation that two supporting characters had sex with a wax recreation of The Wizard of Oz‘s Tinman, and a lame, recurring bit about how Cena’s character is unreasonably obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If this is what counts for “fun,” I’ll happily trade it back in for a standard-issue, gloomy dystopia, please.

‘Jackpot!’ Is Frustrating and Annoying in Equal Measure

Almost every aspect of Jackpot! feels like a misfire, either for tonal or story-based reasons. Why a lottery that includes the attempted murder of the winner proves to be a bigger money-maker than the regular lottery is never addressed. And while I don’t disagree that culture has stagnated, it’s weird to see a movie supposedly set in a more hellish near future continually dropping lazy pop-culture references. (In addition to the TMNT thing and Machine Gun Kelly being around, there are shoutouts to Star Wars, The Karate Kid, the Kardashians, and more.) It’s genuinely mystifying. Even worse, it’s annoying. Early on in the movie, Katie is forced to deal with a ditzy Airbnb renter named Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), who quickly makes a strong case for being the most irritating and unwelcome character in a film this year. Cena and Liu, the latter of whom must be desperately waiting for Marvel to get him back on the schedule, end up in a screaming match about LaCroix sparkling water at one point.

Things aren’t much better on the “action” side of this action-comedy. Again, it’s a story choice to have the film’s events play out as silly instead of violent. Because the Lottery commission has drones that follow Katie around and report her location at regular intervals, she and Noel are constantly under attack by young punks, wannabe actors, no-so-kindly grandmas, and anyone else who’s within grabbing distance of a knife or hatchet. However, Katie and Noel, two people the movie continually insists are among the few “good people” left in a world gone mad, refuse to respond in kind, typically disarming and incapacitating their foes as pleasantly as possible. (At one point, Cena puts a helmet on an attacker before tossing them out of their moving vehicle because he doesn’t want them to sustain a head injury.) Katie is surprisingly effective at fending off hordes of greedy maniacs, although the movie’s explanation that it’s because she once took a stunt-fighting class feels, like everything else, exceedingly flimsy. The fights themselves are slap-sticky, the kind of throwdowns you’d see in a Jackie Chan film but without someone as skilled as Chan gracefully centering the action and holding the frame.

The film’s ideas about the struggle to remain a good person when times are bad and how the government will play us all against each other for its own gain are so simple, basic, and noncommittal that no real thematic throughline is ever able to emerge as a result. Jackpot! could be looked at as an allegory for fame and instant stardom — all the people trying to kill Katie to claim the jackpot are labeled as her “fans,” and Katie’s face is suddenly on every screen in the city — but that feels inconsequential and unprobed as well, probably because the filmmakers were more concerned about fitting in another couple of butthole jokes.

All of this is to say Awkwafina and Cena have both done far better work elsewhere. There are exactly two jokes here that got me to crack a faint smile. The first is when Awkwafina tells Cena he looks like “a bulldog that a witch cast a spell on and turned into a human against his will.” Pretty accurate that. And, then, near the end of the movie, Awkwafina makes a crack about acting being a worthless endeavor as “fucking wrestlers and YouTubers are movie stars now.” It’s an easy joke about her and Cena’s more humble origins, and it’s likely less clever than the best joke from any randomly selected Deadpool scene. But, considering the laugh-free, 90-plus minutes that preceded it, this moderately amusing, self-referential crack felt like discovering an oasis after spending ages lost in the desert. The movie might be called Jackpot!, but no one is leaving this one a winner.

Jackpot! is available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S. starting August 15.

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