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There are plenty of video games that have been turned into movies, but Paul Feig’s latest comedy feels like a movie that should be turned into a video game. After a slow buildup lasting just a few minutes, Jackpot! erupts into a nonstop series of action set pieces that manage the neat trick of being as funny as they are brutally violent. It’s all tremendously silly but somehow it works, thanks to combat choreography that would make Jackie Chan proud and the introduction of America’s premiere new comedy team, Awkwafina and John Cena.
What’s that, you ask? Awkwafina and John Cena? Well, yes, the diminutive, fast-talking actress is hilariously paired with the WWE star who’s somehow transformed himself into America’s most lovable big lug. (If you saw his nearly nude comedy bit at the Academy Awards, you know what I’m talking about.) Coming across like a modern-day Laurel and Hardy — if that legendary screen team had upped their violence quotient exponentially — the pair make this supremely dumb action comedy more enjoyable than it has a right to be.
Awkwafina plays Katie, a former child actress famous for her work in a television commercial for canned spaghetti, who arrives in Los Angeles after a lengthy career hiatus caring for her sick mother. Unbeknownst to her, the city is now gripped with lottery fever — except that this particular game involves one person winning a massive cash prize totaling billions, only to get pursued for a day by everyone else, who can claim the money by killing them. There are no rules except one, namely that guns cannot be used. Katie would have known this if she had only seen the film’s opening scene, featuring a very amusing appearance by an ill-fated Sean William Scott.
