Review: Lottery Ticket

There's this thing you can sometimes do where when you watch a particularly bad movie, if you gat all shimmery in your seat and your head tips back and your soul comes out of your mouth and you go on a time travel transcendental trip back 18 months and have a vision of the dudes, the dudes in suits putting this whole movie together in a boardroom: the laugh beats, the cry scene, the bro v. bro spittle flinging sad-down on a project rooftop, the wacky chase, the hot nasty chick, the lesson learned, the fat grandma, the greedy pastor, the makeout scene, all checked off on a big piece of really expensive paper. Add it all up, jam it into a terrible script, cast a rapper or two, and profit. It's not that you have mystical powers, its just that when a movie is bad enough it gives its audience the ability to instantly see the connections, the way the kid in Searching for Bobby Fischer could look at a chess board and know what colour his opponents ginch were.

Lottery Ticket is a rags-to-riches story about an honest hard-working grandmas-boy who wins a couple hundred million bucks in the lottery and has to survive four days in the projects where he lives before he can collect. He's chased by gold digging hoochies, psychotic ex-convicts, the godfather of the hood, the girl he should be dating, a wannabe entourage and a whole bunch of other super obvious clichés.

It feels robotically assembled from spare parts yanked out of Tyler Perry movies and Friday by aliens trying to understand human behaviour and put back together in the wrong order as an experiment. Bow Wow's performance is… awful, the script doesn't even bother making sense and the most original thing in it is a really colourful pair of Nikes frankenstein-stitched together from other, nicer shoes. Hmmm. A bit of a theme there.

On the other hand, it's shot really well. It has a handful of legitimately nice shots, and the action/chase scenes (Bow Wow gets chased a lot) are handled much better than literally anything else in the film. T-Paine is hilarious, and is about the only guy I want to see again. Plus the movie has a nice lesson: if you win 400 million dollars, your life will be different in a way and you should give your friends jobs I guess. 3/10