Jackpot! (2024)

Paul Feig's Jackpot! arrives with a premise that sounds like a curse placed upon a state budget. California, by 2030, is broke enough to legalize the hunting of lottery winners, who must survive until sundown or forfeit everything. This is a satire of desperation, and it aims its mild contempt at a government that cannot pay its bills, at protection agents who skim their cut, and at a villain who has quietly hoarded a room full of gold. The class resentment is present. It is played for slapstick, never for a manifesto. Nobody stands on a soapbox. Somebody does get hit with a tranquilizer dart.

The ensemble is unusually varied for a mainstream action comedy. Awkwafina, Simu Liu, Dolly de Leon, and Donald Elise Watkins share the screen, and the film treats this as nothing more than a cast list. No scene pauses to reflect on it. Katie Kim is a competent lead who outruns and outwits an entire city, yet her gender sits beside the plot instead of inside it. She fights because she is being chased, not because she is a woman. The film has no interest in the politics of identity, and it says nothing about race, sexuality, the climate, or the body. It is a chase. Chases rarely carry theses.

The result is a broad, loud comedy that prefers chaos to instruction. Any social observation is incidental, buried beneath stunts and celebrity cameos. Feig has made a film about greed that is mostly about noise, and the noise is the point. For a viewer cataloguing cultural markers with a clipboard and a heavy heart, Jackpot! offers a diverse cast, a faint whiff of class grievance, and very little else. It is, in the end, a movie about running.