Jackpot!
Jackpot!
Jackpot!: what happens next is not even a fraction unusual. People dress the same clothes that we use, take the bus to go to work, use cell phones to talk to each other and rent horrible Airbnbs managed by awful people. Face it, even in the near future, one has to spend a lot of money. And if you want to be an actor, you don’t think twice about moving over to Los Angeles.
However, a few things have changed. After the major crash of 2026, the shockingly cash-strapped California government decided to implement a Grand Lottery where some lucky citizen from Los Angeles gets to pocket a large amount of money.
Sounds cool, until prohibitions on kills are offered in the Voting Law. Up until sundown on Lottery Day, up for grabs along with the winnings is the head of the individual (anyone still breathing) who successfully burns the lottery winner (all weapons except for guns are legal). Here, murder didn’t become punishment. Not until sundown. Until next year.
Katie, a Michigander played by Awkwafina, seems to have missed the news as well. Consequently, she arrived in Los Angeles in pursuit of her acting career the night before Lottery Day 2030, which was her unfortunate turn of events.
While at a tryout, of course, she manages to win the lotto and walk away with $3.6 billion. As it quickly becomes clear from the plot, everyone comes after her. And the only person who she can probably trust is a ‘freelance protector’ named Noel who is played by John Cena, who is perhaps the funniest guy in the entire Hollywood. And he will get her home before sundown. Maybe.
This is rather nihilistic regarding what kind of civilization will emerge in a future, even if some examples of films have anticipated that some decades later we will have to kill in order to eat. In Boots Riley’s. Comedy “Sorry to Bother You,” for example, a game is played where people beat themselves in order to earn money and […] repay debts. Which rules out such systems as a cruel concept for consideration, of course, there is still “Squid Game.”
This more dystopia depicts that apart from few people who are engaging in illicit activities in order to make a decent living, most people in this precocious future have been reduced to just using currency as a means to relate with one another.
Katie, just a few hours in her new life in Los Angeles, explodes at a man (Adam Ray) complaining to everyone with a loud voice about his little daughter struggling to get acting jobs that would make the father rich-enough to sit next to his daughter who sits right next to him whiskers. A few moments later, Katie comes across a sweet old lady (Becky Ann Baker) who tells her good luck, then, unobtrusively, snatches Katie’s watch.
Rampant inequality has pushed Angelenos into a state of mind that permeates every interaction and is detrimental: It is only possible to sympathize with someone and help out, do something nice, if material benefit can be gained from it.
That’s interesting to consider as a premise, especially for a film such as this one where it would not be far-fetch to picture a more commercialized variant of human interaction. Also, the idea makes it easy to use the Jackpot! characters for comic relief intent in which they acquire and practice some degree of morality and trust.
But if you remember the film “Jackpot!”, then you understand that it did not quite pull it off. It is produce by Paul Feig from the script of Rob Yescombe, so the film is very energetic and even zany at times but its humor seems to be lacking in substance more than in style.
(“You can’t just steal people’s panic rooms. What are you, Jodie Foster?”) Sam Barry was however a poor recruitment as it appears he was more interested in the story’s visual novelty rather than its profound meaning.
Although the lottery system demonstrates what a more lopsided society looks like, the second part of “Jackpot!” shows what a show business is all about. Katie, after all, has come to Hollywood with a dream (although it becomes apparent later that her reasons are not that simple).
Just like any other aspiring actor, she has to deal with tough rivals, cut-throat ruthlessness of the industry, dishonest agents who are more interested in how much she can make them than in her well being. Once, a character has the audacity to inform Katie that “most of the people do not live beyond 15 minutes of time with no one to represent them.”
She’s describe as having ‘big walking A.T.M.’ on her head. People start to turn into violent fans and fanatics who would be ardently supporting her and even attempting to kill her despite knowing absolutely nothing about her the day before. It also begins to occur to Katie that if she is to remain alive, she has to escape from Los Angeles.
This metaphor isn’t very subtle, nor does it really have to be. But lumped in this story of people who can no longer afford to trust anyone, this sounds a bit off. The gist of Katie’s plight is partly that she wants a friend, but more overwhelmingly, it’s that to be a Jackpot! movie star – not to become one, but to be living it – is really, really hard. Celebrity make people come after you, and Hollywood is a cave full of people waiting to drain any serving star of his or her efficiency.
This is right, and I suppose the film makers understand this business too well. But almost everyone in the world that serves profit at the expense of trust, which seems to be a universal trend, does not focus on the struggles of the popular people that have reached the pinnacle; rather, it is the hopelessness of everyone else. One way or the other might have worked, but together, somewhat, still, there is a level of failure to read the room.
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- Genre: Action, Comedy
- Country: United States
- Director: Paul Feig
- Cast: John Cena, Awkwafina, Simu Liu
