JUST MY LUCK

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: language, sensuality, fortune telling

Rated:

Some people have all the luck. For Ashley Albright (Lindsay Lohan), that adage is true. She must have been born under a lucky star, because things have always gone her way. This walking good luck charm has the best job, the greatest promotions, the best ideas, and can never fail to find a cab, rain or shine. Her perfect lifestyle involves all the right people, a gorgeous apartment, and two best friends who adore her, even if she does always win lotto scratch games.

When her boss leaves it up to Ashley to come up with a fantastic event to woo prospective client and multi-millionaire booking agent Damon Phillips (Faizon Love) into doing business with their firm, Ashley goes all out to impress. The mega-event boasts some of the finest performers in New York, an all out dance party in which she intends everything to go right. The evening seems to be progressing well. Her boss (Missi Pyle) is happily hanging out with Ashley's hunky next door neighbor, the local fortune teller (Tovah Feldshuh) is promising good luck and passionate love to her clients, and Ashley has decided to take a few minutes and dance with one of the guys that has just asked her out.

Little does she know that the boy beneath the mask is accident-prone Jake Hardin (Chris Pine), who doesn't know the meaning of good fortune. On an ordinary day he can be arrested, fall into the lake, get electrocuted exiting the men's room, and have his apartment set on fire. He has been attempting to promote a local group, McFly, to Damon Phillips, and by sneaking into the party as one of the pro-dancers, is sidetracked by the beautiful, ambitious Ashley. Their spontaneous dance leads to an equally spontaneous kiss, and wham! good luck is exchanged from one to the other. Jake goes on to save Damon's life and hit the fast lane, while Ashley is arrested for setting up her boss with a gigolo.

What feels slightly laborious in the beginning starts picking up pace after the main characters officially meet, and it becomes an amusing story about one girl's attempts to get her good luck back. There is an ultimate solution that makes everyone happy, but it's not foreseen in early segments and comes as a cheerful surprise. The audience is torn between them, wondering which should get stuck with the rotten luck -- everything from blowing fuses to getting fingers stuck in bowling balls. There is a sweetness to the production, and it employs the charm of its league of young actors, while never taking itself too seriously. It's not that much of a deviation from some of Logan's earlier projects, and for the most part remains recommendable. Minor sexual content comes into play when Ashley's boss starts making out with her boyfriend in a darkened corner. The man turns out to be a male prostitute, paid to escort women.

After his belt breaks, Jake runs into a woman in the park and they tumble to the ground. Because his pants are around his ankles, the police assume he's an attacker. Realizing it was the kiss that gave her luck a way, Ashley hunts down all the professional dancers and kisses them (one of them is on his way out of a church, having just gotten married). She shows varying amounts of cleavage in most of her outfits. There's a lot of slapstick violence due to both Jake and Ashley being "accident-prone," and mild crude humor -- Jake mistakenly picks up a five dollar bill from the trash, not realizing it was used to pick up dog poop, and Ashley retrieves her contact lens from the cat box. There are only a few profanities, but several uses of s**t.

More disconcerting is the element of karma involved. Ashley has one of the girls read her horoscope, and visits a tarot card reader at the party. "Madame Z" warns her that her luck is about to change for the worse. Making too much of these scenes would be a mistake, since they fail to overshadow the film and are not heavily occult-based, but they might make some viewers uncomfortable. I enjoyed the film because it was mostly innocent and quite funny, as well as managing to be sweetly romantic. Some of its best scenes involve watching McFly perform (the band is played by the real-life band) and Ashley's antics with a deranged washing machine. It's not a film that I will be adding to my collection, but it's worth seeing once if you're a fan of anyone in the cast or just enjoy cute romantic comedies.