The ceiling is pretty low for action comedy, a genre whose biggest hits tend to pepper bloodless shootouts with witty quips from former Saturday Night Live stars. With Prime Video’s Jackpot!, director Paul Feig changes the formula, creating stunt-heavy scenes where the action itself makes you laugh. That can mean anything from Awkwafina hiding among the wax figures of a kitschy Hollywood museum to the sight of ex-wrestler John Cena fighting off a room full of black belts with his Crazy Rich Asians hit on his back.
Why are people trying to kill Awkwafina? “Jackpot!” asks audiences to buy into a clever but often illogical premise that involves a radical rule change to the California lottery. In 2030, the winning ticket comes with a price: The money is yours only if you stay alive until sundown. In the meantime, winners must survive impromptu hunger games on the streets of Los Angeles, where their winnings double as a kind of bounty awarded to whoever is smart enough to kill them.
Nothing against Rob Yescombe (who is considered one of the diversitys Screenwriters to Watch last year), but that idea is pretty much all he accomplished in a sloppy script that’s otherwise bolstered by the cast’s improvisation and surprisingly funny fight scenes. Right from the start, Feig shows how the state’s win-lose-or-die lottery works, as the day’s winner (Seann William Scott) tries to escape a greedy mob. The rules seem pretty straightforward, which makes it hard to swallow that Awkwafina doesn’t know what happens when her number is drawn.
The comedian plays the role of Katie Kim, a former child actress who isn’t thrilled to be back performing, but has no choice after her father, who has no interest in his stage work, runs off with all her earnings. At her first (hilariously humiliating) audition, she discovers the winning ticket in her pocket, accidentally activates it with her thumb, and before she knows it, she’s an instant celebrity: the most valuable person in LA.
Luckily for her, a freelance bodyguard named Noel (Cena) bursts through the wall like a muscle-bound Kool-Aid man and starts bashing heads. He’s the equivalent of a lawyer who’s constantly on the hunt for ambulances – and a welcome ally who helps Katie avoid her “fans” (as they’re called in the film). It turns out that not everyone wants to kill her. But like any good talent agent, this guy expects a 10% commission.
Throughout Jackpot! there are traces of a more pointed Hollywood satire, as if Yescombe or Feig or someone else was poking fun at Americans’ obsession with becoming rich and famous. Oddly, Katie wants neither. She didn’t buy the ticket, she found it in a pair of borrowed gold lamé sweatpants. Even stranger, the film seems to use the word “odd” at the exact moment that vice presidential candidate Tim Walz made it the insult du jour, giving some of the film’s weaker jabs an unexpected resonance.
“Jackpot!” requires a more sophisticated level of physical comedy than Awkwafina has had to deliver before, and although her character is meant to be clumsy and incompetent, it takes considerable skill to pull off the routines that action choreographer James Young has in store for her. Given his WWE background, Cena is much more used to making fake fights seem entertaining, but once again recalls his sense of humor as a sportsman (like the scene-stealer in “Ricky Stanicky” earlier this year).
Feig scored a comedy hit 13 years ago with the Judd Apatow-produced Bridesmaids, but since then he’s had sporadic success and tried to dabble in other genres (most recently with the young adult fantasy flop The School for Good and Evil). “Jackpot!” sits perfectly between The Heat and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and finds the elegant director in his comfort zone, resorting to some of the tricks that worked so well in Bridesmaids, but without the underlying relatability of that film’s brilliant script.
The most obvious of these strategies involves casting, which he entrusts to his secret weapon, Allison Jones, who has been digging up funny people for him and Apatow since Freaks & Geeks. (Jones was the one who brought Seth Rogen and Melissa McCarthy into the picture.) Here she gives the ensemble a half-dozen diverse, hilarious supporting comedians, from Katie’s insensitive/murderous Airbnb host (Ayden Mayeri) to the shady head of the Lottery Protection Agency (Simu Liu) who wants to steal Noel’s fee for himself. She even enlists Machine Gun Kelly, who proves himself a self-deprecating sportsman by playing a panic-room-ready version of himself.
The script for Jackpot! is full of twists and turns, few of which will be surprising, so why give anything away here? That means the onus is on how well Awkwafina and company can spice up their scenes. Jackpot! is one of those movies where you can tell the actors tried dozens of jokes and the editor went with the best ones, even though the outtake-filled credits suggest there were often funnier options. In a way, it’s fitting that Katie’s survival depends on how well she can react on the fly, given how heavily the film also relies on improvisation. That very skill could make Awkwafina a millionaire.
