The year is 2030. We’re in Los Angeles, where a new lottery game is wreaking havoc. It’s the California Grand Lottery, created as an afterthought to the supposed Great Depression in 2026. The point is that if you end up being the lucky one with the winning ticket, you have to survive until sunset, as anyone around you can track the location and claim it. But guns aren’t allowed. Jackpot continues with this silly, Squid Game-esque video game concept of a premise, with Awkwafina as the hapless lead with a billion dollars on her head. (Also Read: Exclusive Interview With Paul Feig: “I Don’t Think I Would Have Made Jackpot If It Had Been More Cynical About Humanity”)

The premise

Director Paul Feig hit the jackpot with his 2011 feature Bridesmaids, in which a group of girlfriends must come to terms with their own reality. That sense of reality is completely absent in Jackpot, which spends much of the film focusing on action comedy rather than character development. When we first meet Awkwafina’s Katie Kim, she’s an aspiring actress who gets robbed in broad daylight. She seems to know nothing about the lottery itself, and when she actually ends up being the lucky winner at a terrible audition, all hell breaks loose.

But the catch is that Katie Kim doesn’t want to be rich? So Katie doesn’t want to be rich and famous without having to do much for it, but she’s not sure if she wants to work (as an actress). So what does she want? Even she doesn’t know.

Meanwhile, on the run, she meets a freelance bodyguard named Noel (John Cena), who arrives just in time before Katie is struck down. The deal is that he won’t kill her, but will only save her in exchange for a 10 percent commission. She reluctantly agrees, still having no idea what’s going on. Cue elaborate action gags that, however, fail to deliver any laughs. There’s also Simu Liu, who plays a shady figurehead of the Lottery Protection Agency. He wants a piece of the pie himself. Even Machine Gun Kelly and Dolly de Leon appear in cameo roles, which doesn’t lend any sense of control to the hectic and unnecessarily over-the-top plot.

Final thoughts

As much as Awkwafina tries to save the day with her physical comedy and great action sequences, Jackpot! is a wreck at its own game. It doesn’t know what to say about the future, what to do with the subject of the particular case of capitalism presented here, or how it leads to instability and fear. The near future looks bleak in Jackpot!, but if the film wants to laugh at this despair, what else is there to argue with?

Good humor can’t counteract the ever-present need to survive. But even good humor doesn’t work in the film’s favor here. The makers of Jackpot! don’t seem to be paying attention to these questions and instead want the audience to go along for the fun ride and cheer on the two as they survive. Jackpot! is not the winner it so desperately wants to be and is a waste of the potential shown by the reliable Awkwafina.

Jackpot! is available to stream on Prime Video.