Jackpot! is the new painfully mediocre film from director Paul Feig. The film is a straight-to-streaming title courtesy of Amazon Studios and feels exactly like a straight-to-video film.

Jackpot! starts with the briefest of lore explanations introducing audiences to a Los Angeles set in the not-too-distant future. After a second great depression the state of California, desperately in need of money, decides to create a new lottery system. The new lottery brings in tons of money for the state and is a hit with the residents of the state. The winners of the lottery are free to bathe in their new riches as long as they survive until sundown. Once the winner is announced, everyone in the city knows who the person is and they can claim that money for themselves, given they kill the winner.

There are a lot of big themes and heady ideas introduced in Jackpot!. There are touches of the famous lottery short story, themes of corporate greed, and big ideas about fame and celebrity. Unfortunately, the film bumbles all of these ideas and essentially is just The Purge as a mid-tier comedy.

Plot

Jackpot! stars Awkwafina as the lucky lotto winner Katie Kim. She is a former child actress who moves back to LA in an attempt to restart her career. John Cena is our second lead and he plays a freelance lottery winner bodyguard named Noel. He offers to protect Katie for the entire day in exchange for a small ten percent stake in her winnings. Throughout the film Katie and Noel fight off bad guys, mega-corporations, and road warrior gangs in slapstick action comedy sequences.

Most of the humor is derived from one-liners and slapstick action. Paul Feig has never been great at shooting action and it’s never been more apparent than here. There are some cool set pieces and comedic tropes, but they all fall flat. The dialogue and jokes are painful at times and there is little fun in this brightly-lit comedy aside from some random cameo’s.

R Rated Comedies

Jackpot! is an R-rated comedy but there is nothing here deserving of that rating. Vince Vaughn recently lamented the disappearances of hard R comedies on Sean Evans Hot Ones and the exclusion of these comedies in Hollywood is painfully evident here. The dialogue is bad, there is no real violence to speak of, and the jokes are safe and inoffensive.

About midway through the film Awkwafina dons a disguise to hide her from the thousands of crazed Angelinos attempting to murder her. Her costume is a stereotypical old Asian man. A Mr. Miyagi type that littered kung fu films and 80s action ripoffs. The film decides to put her in this character and then make a total of zero offensive stereotype jokes, choosing instead to make a joke about gender pay discrimination and urinating while standing.

This scene is standard fair for the entire film. Every chance Jackpot! gets to push the envelope they instead choose a juvenile route. There are poop and fart jokes galore, making the whole film feel like it was written by middle schoolers. My goal isn’t to lament the ultra-offensive comedy films of the early 2000s, but I will point out that the number one movie this summer is an R-rated comedy from Disney. Deadpool and Wolverine has more violence and adult humor than Jackpot! and while Deadpool doesn’t exactly push the envelope, it makes a case for its R rating. Jackpot! could be PG-13 with just a small number of edits. This is a shame coming from the director who made a glitzy twist-filled thriller whose film’s heroine had an illicit incestual affair.

Straight-to-Streaming

Jackpot! feels exactly how you’d expect a straight-to-streaming release to feel. The entire film is brightly lit, the limiting budget is seen throughout, and the cameos are all weird C-list celebrities who are hard to spot. Sean William Scott begins the film before meeting the mildest of ends, Stanly from the office shows up for a second, and New York comedian Murray Hill has an over-the-top bit role. It all feels so cheesy that I was half expecting the film to begin with National Lampoon or American Pie presents: Jackpot!

There are some brief moments of fun in the film. John Cena and Awkwafino do play well off each other, I just wish they were in a different movie. It is great to see Simu Lui play against Awkwafina again but his character is so one note you can see his turn coming from a mile away. That’s the case for every character here though. They are all outrageously single-minded with no development and minuscule arcs.

Unrealized Themes

Jackpot’s biggest sin is its avoidance of anything serious. The film swerves at every chance it has to say something meaningful. The comedy is grossly inoffensive as is the realization of its themes. Jackpot! wants to say something powerful about fame and greed. It wants to create a believable world where people mindlessly murder their fellow citizens for a piece of the pie. The film wants us to believe there are good people in a world full of evil but it never does anything to realize these themes.

The evil people here are evil and have no redemption arc. The good people are good and never once even consider doing the wrong thing. Mega-corporations exist only to make money and they have no qualms about murdering for a bigger payday. There are interesting subtexts here but no follow-through. The best part of a movie about capitalism, greed, and poverty is a cameo by Machine Gun Kelly. Jackpot! is a 5 out of 10 mediocre film that is easily skippable.