With Just My Luck, Lindsay Lohan officially makes the transition from teenage roles to adult ones. And instead of a graceful move, she falls flat on her face. Where is the clever teenager who was in movies like Mean Girls and Freaky Friday? Lohan's (Herbie: Fully Loaded) choice to star in this movie is strange. It's nothing more than a simple wish fulfillment movie seemingly aimed at younger women, but with older characters. And the plot is so moronic that it's hard to believer that her younger fans will stay interested.
Lohan is Ashley Albright, a young woman gifted with luck. Everything good happens to her. She finds money on the floor, the dry cleaners give her Sarah Jessica Parker's clothes, and she just got a huge promotion based on a pitch she gave on the fly for record executive (Faizon Love, Torque, Elf). Albright organizes a costume ball, where she kisses a stranger. All of a sudden, she finds her luck is gone. Everything that could possibly go wrong does. She is fired from her job and spends the night in jail.
The stranger she kissed was Jake Hardin (Chris Pine, The Princess Diaries 2). He is the exact opposite of Albright. Hardin has no luck. He works in a bowling alley and is trying to act as a manager for a McFly, a band he discovered. After the kiss, his band is signed, he gets a new apartment, and everything goes his way. Hardin and Albright continually run into each other, and Hardin, completely sympathetic to Albright's travails, helps her out as much as possible, and the two begin to fall for each other. At the time, Albright learns how to live like a normal person.
The plot sounds stupid and it is. Director Donald Petrie (Welcome to Mooseport, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) uses none of Lohan's good qualities and instead has her do lame things like fall down. It's really sad because she is capable of so much more that dreck like this. It took five writers, I. Marlene King (Now and Then, Senior Trip), Amy Harris, Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer (Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Max Keeble's Big Move), and Mark Blackwell (Max Keeble's Big Move) to come up with a movie that is not funny, not romantic, and characters that are shallow and uninteresting. The premise has some fairytale-like elements to it, but none of the charm necessary to make this movie successful. Here's hoping that Lohan makes some better movie choices in the future. Otherwise, her success will follow Albright's luck and go straight down the toilet.