I'd like to open this review with a little advice to film star, Lindsay Lohan. If you're going to try to advance to more adult roles, try to find adult roles that actually act like adults. Her character in Just My Luck, a worthless and lamebrained romantic comedy, is a spoiled, hateful, and obnoxious woman who acts less like a career woman and more like those spoiled teenage princesses covered in that awful MTV "reality" show Sweet 16. For those of you fortunate enough to have never laid eyes on that show, each episode follows a different spoiled teenage "princess" as she plans her multi-million dollar 16th birthday party, and complain because daddy didn't get her the right Ferrari for her present. I can hardly stand to watch these girls for a half hour, why did anyone think I'd want to watch a movie about one of them? This is supposed to be a morality tale where said spoiled girl learns the hard way how the other half lives, but since she seems to have learned absolutely nothing by the end, I just have to question what director Donald Petrie (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) was trying to say with this movie, other than Lindsay Lohan and physical slapstick comedy don't mix.

The film's opening sequence introduces us to two completely different people. On one end, there's Ashley Albright (Lindsay Lohan) - a charmless spoiled brat of a woman who seems to be able to get everything she wants thanks to her incredible luck. With a recent job promotion and her two shallow best friends (Samaire Armstrong and Bree Turner) constantly swooning over her ability to get any man or thing she wants, Ashley seems to be on top of the world. The other end is inhabited by Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) - a hopeless schmuck of a loser who cleans toilets at a bowling alley for a living, can't seem to catch a break, and is in danger of losing his one ticket out of his bleak existence - managing a rising British band. Fate steps in when the two meet at a masquerade party thrown by Ashley. They share a dance, kiss, and due to some unexplained cosmic force, their luck is immediately switched. Ashley gets Jake's constant bad luck, and Jake gets Ashley's perfect luck.

What follows is a series of sub-sitcom level slapstick situations as Ashley slowly loses everything, and is practically reduced to living on the streets. (Of course, total poverty and depression is uproarious when you keep on getting stuck in comedic situations that play out like outtakes from a bad episode of I Love Lucy.) Jake, on the other hand, instantly finds his music management career on the rise after he saves the life of a powerful music mogul, and is instantly given a New York penthouse and a full recording contract for his band based solely on his actions. (Uh-huh...) Ashley is eventually able to figure out that the kiss she shared with the masked stranger is what changed her life around, and so she begins a desperate search. This being a moronic romantic comedy, it's never that easy, and the characters are forced to act like total idiots in accordance to the unwritten law of the "Idiot Plot" to make sure the movie runs torturously long (In this case, just under two hours.) when the problem could be solved in a mere matter of minutes.

As a concept, Just My Luck maybe could have been cute if the movie was actually trying to say something, but the screenplay by I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris treats the situation like a failed pilot for a youth sitcom on the WB Network. As soon as Ashley's luck changes for the worst, it stops treating her as a character, and instead makes her out to be an idiotic foil who walks into all-too predictable slapstick traps that you can see coming from a mile away. She keeps on moaning about her bad luck, but I couldn't help but think that maybe if she wouldn't willingly electrocute herself, or just didn't turn on that washing machine after she knowingly dumped almost an entire box of detergent in, things would work out better for her. It's not that she's unlucky, it's just that she's a total idiot. The movie keeps on throwing her in a series of unlikely and increasingly ludicrous situations for the sake of humiliating her in an effort to make us sympathize with her plight of getting her luck back, but all it makes us do is despise her even more, because she's too much of a brainless dolt to realize what she's walking into in scene after scene. I'm sorry, I just find it hard to root for a girl who does not have the common sense to avoid exposing a flaming electric hair dryer that is still plugged in to water.

As Lohan's character is constantly pummeled and humiliated by her own stupidity, the character of Jake gets his dream life, and immediately is forgotten by the screenplay until it's his time to have a cute meeting with Ashley. The last time we see Jake, he's overly made up to look like the saddest excuse for a loser in a vain attempt to cover up actor Chris Pine's bland Hollywood pretty boy qualities. Then, when he's reintroduced to us, he's suddenly been made over to a guy to make all the teenage girls in the audience swoon. His overnight change from a guy who looks like he takes fashion tips from Rick Moranis' character in Little Shop of Horrors to Hollywood dreamboat is unexplained, but no matter. Ashley and Jake fall in love, even though there's absolutely no visible chemistry between the characters. Ashley's a hateful spoiled idiot, and Jake is a depressing schmuck. Who wouldn't pay full theater price to see people like these fall in love? Just My Luck falls flat on its face because it gives us absolutely nothing to be interested in and no one to relate to. The movie is so jam-packed with unlikeable one-note characters that it almost seems to be some kind of vicious smear campaign targeted at all the actors involved with this mess.

Judging by everything I've said up to now, you've probably figured out that the performances are not exactly able to lift the film up out of the gutter it digs for itself. Lohan and Pine bring absolutely zero personality, charm, and life to their characters that it almost comes across as a blessing that they spend such precious little screen time together in the movie. She is forced to talk in this constant whiny tone that quickly becomes irritating, and he has all the personality of the dust balls that form under your refrigerator. The rest of the cast don't hold up much better, only because they're pretty much forced to display one single emotion throughout the entire film. None of these people are people I would be interested in talking to, or even share a bus seat with. Not one single performance is able to shine through the muck of this movie, so it becomes a depressingly deadweight excuse for a lighthearted comedy.

I'm straining my brain to think of anything positive I can say about Just My Luck, but nothing's really coming to mind at the moment. The movie is just such an ill-conceived and poorly executed pile that it makes you wonder who in their right mind thought it would work in the first place. This is a cinematic dead zone from which no hope or laughter can escape. There's no luck to be found here, I'm afraid. The real lucky ones are those who use their time finding something better to do than watching this pathetic comedy.

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