PLOT: Lindsay Lohan is an up-and-coming Manhattan career woman with astounding good luck, and Chris Pine is an aspiring band manager with the worst luck possible. They meet, they kiss, they swap luck, Lohan spends the rest of the film trying to get her good juju back.
In Hollywood, you swap lives with someone by magic -- someone older, younger, richer, poorer, male, female, royal, common -- and presto!
Another important life lesson learned. You've got a new perspective. You've walked a mile in their shoes. Now your feet hurt. Something like that.
Anyway, here comes that happy ending.
Lindsay Lohan does a magic trade in Just My Luck, exchanging her good fortune for the lousy luck of a cute guy she encounters. What she learns along the way is, um, well -- she falls in love.
Yeah. That's it. She falls in love.
Here's the problem: Just My Luck isn't really a movie at all. It's a lengthy sitcom episode that underlines how cute Lohan is. With great clothes.
For Lohan's teenage fans, that's enough.
Lohan is adept at physical comedy and Just My Luck has a couple of good laughs. And okay, so it's got complications where the plot should be and adorable mugging instead of character development, but what the heck. The movie only has five writers. Next time they can get six. Seven, maybe. That'll do it.
Just My Luck has a charming opening, with Lohan's wonderful good fortune lighting up every scene. When she comes outside, the rain stops, the sun comes out, she gets a cab right away, there's money stuck to her shoe. While her colleagues squeeze into an elevator at work, she has the luck to get an elevator all to herself, not counting the cute rich guy who jumps in with her at the last minute.
Of course, he asks her on a date.
Meanwhile, across town, a luckless band manager named Jake gets splashed by a car, tears his pants, picks up money smeared with feces and crashes into a jogger in the park. And so on, and so forth.
The good luck/bad luck stuff piles on and piles on, with pratfalls vs. promotions, sorry-ass loss vs. serendipity, and so on and so forth.
Then the lucky girl and the unlucky boy kiss.
Then they trade good luck and bad.
Then: (1) You have to sit through her run of bad luck and (2) his run of good luck. It seems they'll have to meet again somehow and kiss again somehow for Lohan to get her good luck back, and that takes the sort of time that leads to a new appreciation of "eternity."
Just My Luck is a vehicle for Lohan, and not much more. The actress is easy on the eyes, she's funny and she even gets to show a bit of cleavage near the end. Got that? The little girl who starred in The Parent Trap is all growed up, and Just My Luck is the proof. Can we go home now?
BOTTOM LINE: Adolescent girls will love every frame of this cutesy comedy and Lohan will go on to greater triumphs as an Ann-Margret look-alike.
(This film is rated PG)
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