An Amazing Cast Can't Save the 1996 Direct to Video Dark Crime Comedy Just Your Luck
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Watching 1996’s Just Your Luck I felt deeply nostalgic for my early days as a freelance writer for The A.V Club. When I began writing for The A.V Club in May of 1997 I wrote about a LOT of movies like Just Your Luck.
I was a direct-to-video specialist and recent video store alum who delighted in scouring the aisles every Tuesday morning for suspiciously star-studded fare that skipped the multiplex en route to a soft, sad debut on Blockbuster shelves.
I liked direct-to-video movies and felt comfortable writing about them because they were failures and obscurities and overwhelmingly very bad and from the very beginning I felt more comfortable writing about failures than successes.
The direct-to-video market not only rewarded but demanded a certain level of skepticism and cynicism. After all, if that direct to video movie with all of the huge name in its cast was any damn good at all wouldn’t it have gotten a theatrical release of some sort? Wouldn’t it get reviewed in the weekly paper and alt-weekly and be the subject of a cultural conversation of some sort?
The more a direct-to-video movie seemingly had going for it, the worst it was widely assumed to be.
In that respect, it ironically does not bode well for Just Your Luck that it stars a murderer’s row of great character actors: Virginia Madsen, Bill Erwin, Mike Starr, Ernie Hudson, Jon Polito, the hip rock star duo of Flea and John Lurie, the pre-stardom team of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, looking like babies in some of their very first film roles, and indie fixture Alana Ulbach and Boondocks Saint Sean Patrick Flannery.
Yet I nevertheless felt a surge of optimism coursing through me as I watched the film’s opening credits. There are just SO many great actors in it and it fits snugly into my nostalgia sweet spot. At the very least it promised to be a relatively painless way to spend an hour and a half.
I fuzzily half-remember reviewing Just Your Luck during my early days at The A.V Club but nothing turns up online and I could very well be confusing it with any number of other star-studded looks at kooky criminality.
Just Your Luck takes place largely at a nondescript diner owned by earthy immigrant Nick (Polito) and frequented by a series of broad types. There’s humble, working class family man baker Willie (Hudson), Kim (Madsen) and Ray (Flannery), a pair of cold-blooded lawyers on a date, scummy criminal gambling actor Straker (Favreau), mentally ill homeless woman Momie (Carroll Baker, doing a cruel burlesque of insanity) and cops Carl (Starr) and Barry (Vince Vaughn).
One otherwise unremarkable evening, Pops (Erwin), an avuncular old man with a thing for playing the lottery excitedly announces that he’s won the lottery and then promptly seems to keel over dead, the victim of an apparent heart attack.
But before he ostensibly casts off his mortal coil he first inspires the film’s only laugh. Pops wants to look at a newspaper to confirm that he’s won six million dollars but he’s so excited that he can’t communicate clearly.
So instead of asking the lawyers if he can borrow their newspaper to see if he won six million dollars he instead rasps, “Six million!” in a state of crazed excitement, to which Madsen’s pragmatic lawyer answers nonchalantly, “Yeah, I was really busted up about the Holocaust too.”
I’m not sure why this line, and only this line, made me howl like a maniac. Madsen’s gloriously understated delivery is part of it but I also love using a wildly, hilariously inadequate phrase like “busted up about” to describe your feelings about six million men, women and children being herded into gas chambers and assassinated en masse.
When the alternately extremely lucky and extremely unlucky old codger seemingly meets his maker after the break of a lifetime, the people in the diner are faced with a moral dilemma. Do they call 911 and risk the old man living long enough to cash in his own lottery ticket?
Or do they discreetly see to it that the old man conclusively dies so that they can split up the six million dollars between them?
The diner gang is debating the matter when Straker slinks back into the diner with a gun. At this point the movie stops feeling like a play or early live television production and starts feeling like one of the many Tarantino knockoffs that littered video store aisles in the aftermath of Pulp Fiction’s zeitgeist-capturing success.
Just Your Luck perhaps unsurprisingly becomes a crime movie when the greedy hoodlum ends up dead after a lawyer stabs him in the back. The possibility of collecting on the payday of a lifetime brings out the worst in everyone.
The obscenely over-qualified cast pairs off for conversations involving pop culture, race, sex and other topics popular with the colorful lowlifes of Tarantino knockoffs.
Flea and John Lurie play career criminals introduced discussing John Bon Jovi’s sex life (ah, the 1990s!) who show up at the diner seeking the twenty-seven thousand dollars Straker owes them and immediately figure out that something is hopelessly amiss in a way they may benefit from.
Just Your Luck keeps fruitlessly upping the ante by introducing more and more violence and murder into the mix. The overwhelmed schemers foolishly if conveniently neglected to make sure the old man actually died.
So it’s not entirely surprising when he roars back to life in a state of profound confusion. At this point Madsen’s lawyer murders him. Even when playing a cooly calculating yuppie lawyer Madsen somehow can’t keep from being typecast as a man-killer.
Then the cops show up and the usually rock-solid Starr goes into overdrive and the movie ends in an incoherent flurry of violent and bloodshed that ends things on a note at once wildly histrionic and anti-climactic.
As is generally the case with this project, Madsen is easily the best part of a frequently dodgy production. She scores the movie’s one laugh and has a great monologue where she talks about how much she hates living in the city would love to escape the ugliness and stink and noise of urban life for an idyllic existent upstate in the country.
I went into Just Your Luck thinking that it would be a relatively painless way to waste an hour and a half. I’m not sure it actually clears that very modest hurdle.
Just Your Luck afforded Madsen an opportunity to escape the ghetto of low-budget erotic thrillers but failed her and her extraordinary gifts all the same.
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