Former child actor Katie (Awkwafina) has returned to Los Angeles hoping to revive her acting career after a long hiatus. Although her first audition goes pretty bad, she is suddenly the center of all of Los Angeles’s attention when she is announced as the winner of the $3.3 billion state lottery. The only catch is, in this near future, economically depressed California, she has to stay alive for a number of hours in order to collect her winnings, while anyone can try and killer and claim the prize themselves. (But in a move that probably drew protests from the NRA, no guns are allowed.) Soon everyone is chasing after her to get the ticket, from random Angelinos to her ditzy AirBNB host (Ayden Mayeri, in what will hopefully be a breakout role for the actress). Fortunately for Katie, help comes in the form of Noel (Cena), an amateur lottery protection agent who offers to keep her alive until the deadline passes. The two form an uneasy alliance, even as money-hungry people and a rival protection agency headed up by Simu Liu close in.
Jackpot!‘s concept is basically a comedic riff on the Purge franchise with dashes of The Hunger Games and The Running Man and a whiff of the economic desperation of 1979’s Americathon. But the movie isn’t interested so much in exploring the premise’s economic implications as it is in commenting on fame. Some of that is a bit nail-on-the-head, with those who hunt the winning ticket holder are euphemistically called “fans” by the lottery program.
Director Paul Feig keeps things fast-paced, slowing down the action sequences only for the prerequisite character moments in which Katie and Noel get to know each other better. Tonally, the film is of a piece with his 2015 action-comedy Spy. The fights are well choreographed and shot, always leaving room for some banter from the leads. And Cena and Awkwafina bounce off of each other fairly well in both the comedic and the sporadic more serious moments. That’s a good thing too, as the film is pretty much carried by the two.
By setting the film just a few years in the future, Feig doesn’t have to worry about designing too many science-fiction elements for the film outside of some of the guns we see in use. But with the exception of a few quick glimpses early in the first act, he also doesn’t visually sketch out the economic depression that serves as the backdrop for the story. If anything, he seems to be actively disinterested in exploring the idea at all. As the end of a series of title cards at the start of the movie explaining the entire setup states, “Some people call it dystopian, but those people are no fun.” And if anything, Jackpot!‘s main theme isn’t the downside of fame or the lengths people will go to get rich quick, but in entertaining the viewer. And it does a good job at that.
