Winning is just the beginning! -– "Lottery Ticket" Review

I'm going out on a limb here in defense of a movie that has thus far achieved a whopping 2.7 out of 10 on the IMDb's popular rating. I'll admit that I wasn't interested at all when I first saw trailers for Lottery Ticket, but since it's my job I watched it anyway and was pleasantly surprised. It's not one of my favorite movies, but it's one of my favorite movie-going experiences, when a movie that I expect to suck turns out to be not so bad after all.

It's aimed at the same stoned audiences as movies like Half Baked and Friday, but the first time feature filmmaking team behind it understands how little their audience demands, and still gives us more.

It stars Bow Wow as Kevin Carson, a kid living in the projects and working at his local Foot Locker. Before the title gimmick is introduced, we learn of Kevin's disdain of anything designed to keep poor people poor (like the lottery), his sympathy for the unlucky weirdos of the world (most notably Mr. Washington - Ice Cube - who lives with Kevin and his grandmother - Loretta Devine - in their basement), and the fact that he's surrounded by people willing to go to all kinds of crazy lengths to get their hands on a $370 million lottery ticket. These are the people he must survive over the 4^th of July weekend while he waits for the ticket office to open.

Sure, the whole premise of the plot would evaporate if Kevin went to the bank and put the ticket in a safe deposit box, but where's the fun in that? Better to have him hanging out with crazy hot gold digger and taking out loans from a ruthless gangster, but no points for guessing that soon Kevin's life is threatened for his lack of forward thinking skills.

And by the way, whose idea was it to announce the winning numbers right before the 4^th of July weekend? Isn't the lottery's long history of taxing people who suck at math bad enough? Now they have to deliberately torture winners for days at a time when they should be enjoying their beloved nation's birthday? Unbelievable.

The movie's greatest strength isn't in its paper-thin premise, of course, since it's been done countless times before, but in the remarkable variety of different comedic and dramatic tones that it shoots for, and mostly achieves. Kevin's best friend Benny (Brandon T. Jackson) is hurt when Kevin doubts whether his friendship is real or he's just after the money, his grandmother has some great comedic moments - as is to be expected from the brilliant Loretta Devine - he gets involved in a love triangle between his long-standing friend Stacie (Naturi Naughton) and the hottie who's clearly after his money (Teairra Mari), and the gangster caricature isn't the most penetrating character in the world, but I'll watch Keith David do anything.

I've heard the movie described as partially biographical about it's first-time leading man, (Lil') Bow Wow, who struck it rich in the music industry when he was just a kid, and probably did something similar to what he does in this movie with the $100,000 he borrows from the gangster and then blows in a single night. And this is where the movie is at its most entertaining. It comes off as trying too hard on several occasions, like Ice Cube with his weirdly whitened hair and old man drawl (which sadly throws a wet towel on one of the movie's most interesting characters), or anything about preacher caricatures, but the primary idea about the movie is what would a regular guy do with millions and millions of dollars?

Of course, the recurring theme is that tons of money brings you tons of troubles, but it also brings you tons of money, right? That's really all that matters to Kevin, as it does to all of you. Come on, don't lie. Show me someone who would turn down $370 million because it would bring too many problems and I'll show you someone with some severe pathological dishonesty issues. I could handle any problems that hundreds of millions of dollars might bring me, couldn't you? As Ben Affleck famously said in Boiler Room, "People who say money can't buy happiness, don't have any." THERE is some honesty, ladies and gentlemen.

Not that honesty or realism are high on the movie's priority list. It gives us a conspicuously watered down version of what life in the ghetto is really like (not that I've ever lived in the ghetto, but I'm guessing it's not quite as family-friendly as what we see in the movie), although I have to disagree with some who have argued that the movie swings back and forth too much from comedy to gritty violence. Real life tends to do that, too. Just sayin'.

But I'm mostly impressed with the acting turned in by Bow Wow, who has wisely shed the first syllable of his original name and is now showing real acting skills. He has a good future in the movies ahead of him, if he wants, but step 1 might be to get rid of that goofy name. Why would he call himself Bow Wow when his real name is Shad Moss?

Note - Keep your eye out for T-Pain, whose real name, Faheem Najm, isn't nearly as cool as Shad Moss. He's wearing a bright red shirt, you can't miss him.

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