Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jackpot!’ on Amazon Prime Video, an R-rated action-comedy starring John Cena and Awkwafina. (Hey, that rhymes!) (2024)

Jackpot (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) pairs two of the funniest people currently cracking wise in movies: Awkwafina (who’s coming off an inspired turn in the highly amusing Quiz Lady) and John Cena (who was funny enough to somehow make me kinda like Ricky Stanicky). They anchor an action-comedy directed by Paul Feig of Bridesmaids fame, but let’s be real here – Jackpot is no Bridesmaids (nor is it Spy, even). The potential is there for this pretty stupidly violent quasi-satirical lark to elicit many a hoot and guffaw, although concept is one thing and execution is another, and I’m unfortunately leaning more toward “another.”

JACKPOT!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2030. The Great Depression of 2026 inspired the state of California to create a lottery with a gigantic cash prize, but here’s the hook: It’s totally legal for one to murder the person holding the winning ticket and take the dough for oneself. The only rules? No guns, and you’ve gotta kill ’em before sundown. We learn all this in opening title cards that conclude with this rimshotter: “Some people call it dystopian. But those people are no fun.” Got it? DON’T BE NO FUN, and if you don’t laugh at this movie’s joke barrage, it’s obvious you’re a f—ing killjoy!

Now we meet Katie Kim (Awkwafina), who’s just moved back to Los Angeles. She’s a former sort-of child star who’s hoping to get back into the acting game; some remember her as the girl in the Spaghetti Squares commercial. Her mother recently passed and she has a little bit of cash in her pocket, but that’s it. Kind of a nothing-to-lose situation here. She rents a scuzzy room from Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), who of course is a lunatic with big wide untrustworthy eyes. Katie wakes up to find liquid poo has dripped all over her clothes, and she ends up borrowing an outfit from Shadi that’s head-to-toe gold and makes Katie look like the mini Oscar statuette her mother gave her as a good luck charm, except a bit bigger. Why is this an important detail? I’m getting to that. Patience, please – and you’ll need it, since this movie is 106 minutes long when it should be a tight 89.

Katie goes to a horrible audition in her mid-2000s rapper garb and realizes Shadi’s lottery ticket is in the pocket. Of course, it’s the winner and it’s worth a record $3.6 billion and Katie accidentally activates it with her fingerprint and this is when the wacky action kicks in and the plot holes start to open up like massive crevasses during a 9.0 Richter-scale quake. The populace descends upon her with meat cleavers and axes and karate chops, and she finds herself fighting her way through a variety of ludicrous set pieces: a martial arts dojo, a yoga studio, a wax museum, Machine Gun Kelly’s house, etc. She has some assistance, though, and this is where John Cena comes in, playing Noel, a freelance security beefsteak who helps lottery winners live to see sundown in exchange for a 10 percent cut of the prize.

Now, you’re surely asking, why doesn’t Noel just kill her and take the billions for himself? Because he’s a good doobie of a human being, that’s why. Not everyone in this very dumb movie is a selfish cretinous jackass capable of homicide! Katie and Noel participate in heaps of violence and jokes and wherever the twain between those two things shall meet, and just when it all starts to wear thin, Simu Liu shows up in the plot as Louis Lewis, a former colleague of Noel’s who runs a big, corporate lottery-winner security org. Louis has veritable fleets of muscle in his employ, and for that he takes 30 percent. It seems an entire cottage industry has sprung up around this lottery business. America! Capitalism! Now more than ever!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Jackpot is The Purge crossed with Idiocracy meets, I dunno, Lucky Numbers? It Could Happen to You? Jerry and Marge Go Large?

Performance Worth Watching: Awkwafina and Cena are the rare funnyfolk who are frequently the best parts of mediocre-to-bad movies. Putting them both in the same film is an inspired idea – on paper. But in reality, this material fails them. Jackpot won’t curtail anyone’s admiration for them, but the jokes don’t always hit like they should.

Memorable Dialogue: In lieu of spoiling one of the better one-liners, here’s one of Awkwafina’s medium-strength zingers: “At least the neighborhood’s diverse – it smells like sh*t AND piss.”

Sex and Skin: Just a bit of crude talk.

Our Take: In Jackpot, Awkwafina and Cena take a backseat to all the mayhem. Loser move! Feig has proved himself capable of cultivating a strong sense of back-and-forth/one-liner comedic timing, but action is his weak suit. He seems to aim for the manic energy of a Jackie Chan film or a David Leitch joint (see: Deadpool 2, The Fall Guy), but his middling execution of action sequences leaves one more unimpressed than amused. There are chases on wheel and foot, and knife fights, and fisticuffs, and Looney Tunes slapstick, and a fair amount of crotch-stomping, and it’s all incredibly violent. Kudos to Feig for finding a plot loophole that lets him avoid shootout cliches, but otherwise, none of this is particularly memorable.

Everything else in the film exists on a degree of -assedness: half-assed characters, quarter-assed concept, eighth-assed themes. Our beloved principal pair work with three or four broadly defined sympathetic characteristics between them, thus rendering them joke-spewing machines working with a 50/50 hit-and-miss screenplay. The death-lottery idea is rendered as loosey-goosey sloppy-gloppy nonsense, and while we’re not here to assess its conceptual tightness – we are here for a little escapism, not a profound analysis of the human condition – all these plot holes tend to distract from the barrage of gags. And thematically, Feig and screenwriter Rob Yescombe aren’t sure if they want to play inside baseball with movie-biz satire, craft a wicked spoof of capitalism or plumb the ugliest components of human behavior for dark comedy; this thing is a mushpile. And then it ends with ye olde bloopers and outtakes over the credits, insisting that what we just sat through was funnier than we remember. It wasn’t! Sorry!

Our Call: Jackpot inspires more than a few laughs – that’s impossible when Cena and Awkwafina are front and center. But it’s ultimately disappointing, and doesn’t get the most from its talented cast. So SKIP IT unless you’re really desperate for a chuckle.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.