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- "Lucky Numbers"
(Reviewed October 15, 2000)
- This is a quirky comedy that tries to be a sillier and lighter version of "To Die For" and, for the most part, actually succeeds. John Travolta is a big-ego, low-bankroll weathercaster
who connives to rig the Pennsylvania state lottery with charmingly bitchy Lotto TV girl Lisa Kudrow, a plan that goes awry in every way possible.
The pacing could have been tightened, and Bill
Pullman's slacker police officer character is so out of place that the part should have been cut, and Travolta's role may have been better interpreted by someone a tad closer to the Bill Murray school of
deadpan antic frustration.
But the script gets bonus points for being darker and more offbeat than audiences will expect, and Lisa Kudrow is absolutely wonderful in every way. It is strangely
charming to hear her cussing up a storm and acting like a sweetly self-absorbed shrew, for example. One of her best lines comes when she is in a car that gets stuck behind an Amish buggy on a narrow
lane. Lisa yells, "Put a motor on it, Jake!" Kudrow is so adorable here that she almost made me want to watch that horrible, horrible TV show she is in. But then I remembered that I actually do have a
brain, and I manfully resisted.
Back Row Grade: C+...ah, hell, make it a B-
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