Released as its star Lindsay Lohan enters a spiral of celebrity freefall, Just My Luck is directed by Donald Petrie, who is a dab hand at turning unbelievable Hollywood nonsense into something resembling a decent movie. So he almost managed to make you forget that the undercover cop and supposed frump in Miss Congeniality was the never-less-than-hot Sandra Bullock. Or that in the romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Kate Hudson … to be honest, it’s so whimsical and borderline nasty that I’m not going to go there. Here Petrie takes the still perky screen presence of Lohan and inserts her into a similarly whimsical and borderline nasty scenario – she’s the luckiest girl in the world (she works in PR, so hey) who one night, when the planets are lined up a particular way, or something, meets the unluckiest man in the world (Chris Pine). They kiss. And suddenly he’s on the up and her perfect life is on the skids. Luck and its transferability being the big idea, as it was in another much better recent film, The Cooler. Though as Just My Luck progresses, and Lohan’s character – whose name, Ashley Albright, has rhythmic and alliterative echoes of her own – finds the unlucky life increasingly heavy going, it becomes clear that what this movie is really about is how difficult it is for the incredibly privileged to find their way through what to you and I would be termed normal life. Poor poor Lindsay.
Just My Luck – at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2006