Lucky Numbers

Nineteen-ninety-four’s “Pulp Fiction” may have rejuvenated John Travolta’s career, but if he keeps taking roles like that in “Lucky Numbers,” it will be right back in the meat locker. A painfully bad black comedy that also sets Lisa Kudrow’s career back a few steps, the picture makes you wonder why people bother making movies at all. It is equally unclear why this so-called story attracted any interest, though the writer is Adam Resnick, whose previous best known work was “Cabin Boy,” which may explain a lot. Poorly conceived and badly executed, the movie consists of a bunch of dumb and not particularly appealing people doing stupid things for poorly explained reasons. To say that the movie strains credibility is probably lavishing more attention on it than it deserves. Travolta plays Russ Richards, a dim bulb of a weatherman in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who enjoys his local celebrity but dreams of a bigger career as a game show host. His occasional lover, Crystal (Kudrow), is a periodically homicidal nut case who also happens to be the Lottery girl on TV.

When Russ runs into financial difficulty (he bought a snowmobile dealership just before a heat wave, which is about as funny as this movie gets), his friend Gig (Roth), a strip club owner, suggests that he enlist Crystal’s aid to rig the lottery. A variety of complications ensue, none of which are in the least bit interesting. The movie also features Russ’s dimwitted assistant and his dimwitted boss (O’Neill), as well as a dimwitted thug (played by the always amusing Rapaport, who should find better roles), Crystal’s dimwitted cousin, and a dimwitted cop (Pullman). Are you sensing a pattern here? The problem with making a movie about dimwitted people is that the picture itself often winds up dimwitted, and that is exactly what happened here. Making the characters in “Lucky Numbers” venal and petty, as well as dimwitted, doesn’t help matters in the least. The picture is hardly as dark and edgy as it seems to think it is, unless you find idiocy and its consequences dark, and it’s certainly not funny. The movie ends (not a minute too soon) with the timeworn gimmick of a postscript describing what happens to each of the annoying characters we have met (like we could care less). It even resorts to a very dated joke about “an unknown stock called Microsoft.” (Please. I think we’re all a bit beyond Microsoft humor by now.)

Director Nora Ephron managed to parlay her best script (1989’s “When Harry Met Sally...”) into what strikes me as a career of completely underserved prominence. A master of the mawkish, she has been responsible for some of the more annoying pictures in recent memory (including “You've Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle”). She continues her decidedly undistinguished track record here, neither imbuing “Lucky Numbers” with a distinctive look (the whole thing looks like it was shot on a back lot in Burbank), nor injecting any energy into the lifeless proceedings. She probably should have avoided this script in the first place, but if anyone’s career deserves to be put into a meat locker, I vote for Ephron’s. (11/4/2000)