Week #2: Jackpot! is a silly though watchable take on dystopia
Contrary to what people might think, it was Kamala Harris’s mother Shyamala who quipped that young people often think they “fell out of a coconut tree”. Much to her chagrin, Jackpot!’s plot certainly fell out of one.
Katie Kim (Awkwafina) lands in Los Angeles a month after her mother’s death, determined to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. A former child actor, Katie’s aspirations are rooted in her mother’s love for movies and movie stars, as she later confides to Noel (John Cena).
Bizarrely, she has no idea about the “Grand Lottery” scheme that gives commoners the chance to win life-changing amounts of money in 2030s California.
The scheme’s catch is that those who don’t win are legally allowed to kill the winner before sundown and claim the money for themselves. The only justification we get for this scheme’s existence is record-high levels of unemployment and inflation.
I would think that in a world where such a scheme is legit, something more substantial needs to have happened for people to be able to justify murder. Having said that, this movie is best enjoyed by not thinking too much about the details.
Katie is doing her thing at an audition when the news of her winning the lottery comes out (Katie has accidentally entered herself in the lottery, we are told).
Without wasting much time, people around her swiftly make their way to kill her. Amidst this chaos comes Noel who seemingly freelances as a protector of lottery winners for a cut of their winnings.
To be clear, the lottery has been in place for a few years now and Katie’s justification for having no clue about it is that watching the news was too depressing for her in recent years. She and her mom just watched movies and “emotionally neutral baking shows”.
Even someone who has no interest in the news would certainly come across something as major as a scheme that allows people to commit legal murder - as long as they have a mobile phone and an internet connection.
If Katie had instead said that her mother’s place was in a remote forest with no internet connection and no one to talk to for miles, that might have been a more believable backstory (I know what I said four paragraphs ago about not thinking about the details, but I am not able to let this one go).
Moving on, Katie has a hard time trusting Noel’s intentions but eventually comes around (over the course of a few hours only, mind you). Katie’s dad ran away with all the money she earned as a child actor, which has made it hard for her to trust people. But something about Noel seems pure to Katie and in a world where everyone is literally out to get her, Noel offers a sense of safety and companionship.
Noel’s backstory is that he used to be a mercenary and left that work after he learnt that not all people he was being sent to kill were bad. One of his fellow mercenaries was Louis Lewis (Simu Liu) who now runs a lottery winner protection agency. Noel has had to hesitantly ask for his help to help protect Katie.
But the protection agency is corrupt and Louis, like most people apart from Katie and Noel in this story, is a baddie.
The rest of the film is as predictable as it gets, with Katie and Noel trying not to get killed. Towards the end, Noel tries to reason with Louis. There are dialogues such as “You talk about these jackpots like they’re like they’re fucking people. They’re big, walking ATMs.” To which Noel proffers, “You really are a reprehensible chunk of wet shit, Louis.” Louis then explains to Noel that the world runs on money (yeah, didn’t know that).
Even so, I do like the dystopian idea at the heart of this film. Perhaps this scheme is just a less pretentious version of the kind of moral decay we already live in. Profiteering has trumped the Earth’s (and its residents) health for a long time now, and isn’t that also a kind of legal murder, albeit the slow kind?
In the end, Katie and Noel emerge victorious, and Katie shares half of her $3.6 billion winnings with him. With the money, Katie and Noel start a free-for-all protection agency and a self-defence school. There is also the “Katie Kim Center for Kids with Shitty Parents”.
Before the credits roll in, the film doesn’t fail to partake in some rich bashing in vogue these days. In the end, we see Noel and Katie reclined on sun loungers on the deck of a superyacht.
Noel asks Katie if the money has changed them. Katie agrees and admits that they've become "gigantic shitheads" before casually ordering a dolphin sandwich.
The superyacht setting seems a bit ominous to me though, what with the tragic sinking of the Bayesian in the news recently. But Katie doesn’t read the news. Ignorance is bliss - until it isn’t.
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Coming up
In Week #3 of What I Saw Last Week: Hindi-language film Kill directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, arriving September 22.
In other news…
Shows I’m currently watching: Bad Monkey, Only Murders in the Building S4 and Pachinko S2.
Books: Currently reading Christine by Stephen King.