So imagine you're part of a grossly overpaid team of Hollywood screenwriters. The past few months have been such a crazy blur of coke binges and enemas that you plumb forgot that you've been assigned to write the new Lindsay Lohan comedy. And shooting starts tomorrow! Don't panic, because you've got a surefire gimmick: Luckiest woman in the city kisses the unluckiest man, swapping fortunes with the spit. What's the first thing that pops into your head? Unlucky people get rained on and have their clothes soaked by passing cars; lucky people have the clouds part when they leave the house. There are at least four or five good sight gags right there. How about an unlucky person placing a priceless artifact on a rickety ladder? No, too obvious. Maybe putting a bowling ball on a high, rickety shelf with a bunch of other bowling balls? Bingo!
And on and on goes Just My Luck, a lazy spitballing session of karmic humor, hinged on the sort of generic rom-com contrivances that keep movies like these from ending at a reasonable time. In a premise that in no way resembles her body-switching breakthrough Freaky Friday, Lohan stars as a cosmically blessed PR lackey whose luck changes when she meets supremely bumbling Chris Pine at a music-industry masquerade party. A bowling-alley clerk moonlighting as a manager for an unsigned British band, Pine sneaks into the party as a hired dancer in order to get face time with high-powered record executive Faizon Love. After Lohan and Pine kiss, he gets his record deal and a nouveau-riche penthouse, while she breaks a heel, loses her job, and has more trouble than usual hailing a cab.
In order to find the man behind the mask and get her luck back, Lohan scours the city for every hired dancer at the party and kisses them all, one by one. This goes on for quite some time. After that, she and Pine meet by happenstance at a diner, but don't recognize each other, which allows for more strained good-luck/bad-luck gags, such Lohan going to war with a sudsy washing machine or electrifying herself with fluorescent bulbs and hair blowers. Just My Luck seems intended as a transitional film from the silly girl-friendly comedies of Lohan's adolescence to the career-Barbie comedies of young adulthood. But if she keeps appearing in gimmicky fluff like this, any genuine revelations will have to keep coming from the tabloids.