Just My Luck (2006)

Just My Luck arrives from 2006, a year when a romantic comedy could still be built on the premise that a Manhattan publicist has too much good fortune and a janitor has too little, and that a single kiss at a masquerade ball might redistribute both. Lindsay Lohan plays Ashley, who loses her job, her apartment, and her dignity in quick succession once the luck transfers to Chris Pine's Jake, unpaid manager of the band McFly. The plot proceeds with the grim efficiency of a fortune cookie. Critics were unkind at the time, and the intervening years have not improved the film's standing. It is a machine for generating mild embarrassment, and it runs without complaint.

For those of us who catalogue the era's social signifiers, this one is a barren field. The cast includes Faizon Love and Carlos Ponce in supporting roles, and they are simply present, doing their jobs, unremarked upon by anyone. That is the whole of the film's demographic ambition. There is no argument to be made about gender, no economic grievance, no environmental anxiety, no reconsideration of the historical record. The movie wants only to place two attractive people inside a series of contrived inconveniences and then marry them off. Its most political gesture is the casting of a pop band as themselves in an extended advertisement for their own catalogue.

The result is a document of a vanished sensibility, when a studio could release something this weightless and expect nothing more from it than a B CinemaScore and a modest worldwide gross. There is something almost restful about it. No lessons are delivered. No viewer is scolded. The film ends with water raining down on the happy couple from a broken pipe, and the camera lingers as though this were a joke about karma. It is not. It is merely water.