Otherwise, anything goes. Participants can use knives, clubs, broken bottles, baseball bats, chains, rubber hoses, spears, curtain rods, mop handles, and presumably cars (although I don’t recall anyone trying to deliberately run anyone over, which seems like a strange oversight in hindsight). They can hunt alone or in groups, even very large groups.

Awkwafina plays the target of the latest hunt, Katie Kim, a former actress who has just returned home after spending many years visiting her terminally ill mother in another state. Her father died some time ago. She was not on good terms with either of her parents. We get a few details about her personal life to explain why she is unaware that the California state lottery has become a murderous manhunt (she has been spending time with her mother; no, really, that is why) and why she deserves our sympathy (aside from the fact that, like other past lottery winners, she does not deserve to be hunted like an animal; no one deserves that). Katie comes across her own winning ticket purely by chance and does not realize she has it until her number is drawn at an audition (which she does not get) and everyone starts staring at her like a cartoon wolf staring at a sheep and imagining lamb chops.

An entire economy seems to have developed around lottery hunting, although the film focuses on only one part: the security experts who track down winners and offer them protection from harm in exchange for a share of their fortune. John Cena plays one of these security guards, a lovable thug named Noel. He used to work for a highly successful lottery security company run by a snotty daredevil named Louie Lewis (Simu Liu). He saves Katie from death after the audition, when everyone in the building, including other actresses and a gym full of karate students, has turned against her. She’s studied stage combat, but hasn’t learned much. Her instincts are good, but she lacks the tricks to survive. Without Noel, she’d be a dead man. And without Katie, Noel would be just another square-jawed macho guy. (Of course, he has a backstory that Katie will gradually coax out of him.)

Written by Rob Yescombe, who has previously worked primarily on video games, Jackpot! makes no real-world sense, and isn’t meant to. It has a video-game-like repetition and a gradual escalation leading to a showdown with Big Boss. There’s a lot of obviously improvised comedy, which sometimes hits home, but more often it feels like someone filmed the exercises in a comedy workshop. It all serves a film that’s more half-baked nonsense than full-blown satire.

And the film seems determined not to explore the deeper implications of the scenario it presents, in which lottery-chasing is the logical consequence of a society that seems to have completely given up on instilling decent values ​​and instead chosen to monetize the worst human behavior. When Katie rents a tiny room through a website and, upon arrival, discovers that it looks nothing like the pictures online, the young woman renting it, aptly named Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), chirps, “We used fake photos because who else is going to stay here?” Early in the film, Katie sees a hateful stage dad ranting loudly and vulgarly about his young daughter, who just failed an audition. “Sorry for all the swear words,” he tells the child. “I only swear when your mom acts like shit.”