Is
the success — or lack thereof, really, since it grossed a meager $17
million Stateside — of something as innocuous and bland as the
teen-pitched romantic comedy Just My Luck a public edict on
star Lindsay Lohan‘s tabloid-fodder private life, or is it just the
product of disinterest in the movie’s concept or attentions diverted
elsewhere? It’s hard to say definitively, really, but there’s
considerable anecdotal evidence that the former may be the case.

After all, fellow teen-queen Hilary Duff‘s similar tale of wish fulfillment, A Cinderella Story, pulled in over $50 million two years earlier, the same year that Lohan’s surprise hit Mean Girls raked in over $85 million in theaters. (To be fair, Duff’s The Perfect Man similarly underperformed in the middle of last summer, pulling in numbers comparable to Just My Luck.)
Still, many box office followers were surprised by how poorly the movie
did. It certainly couldn’t have been the strength of its
opening-weekend competition, which in the second week of May included
only the soccer drama Goal! The Dream Begins and Poseidon, one of the summer’s biggest, unmitigated flops.

The point is that fans generally turn out like lemmings for
middle-of-the-road genre fare, and a meticulously vetted
audience-pleaser like Just My Luck has “wheelhouse strength”
written all over it. But… a swing and a miss. Outside of the
Disney-branded hit remakes which were a staple of her meteoric rise and
Mean Girls — which distinguished itself as smarter-than-average
teen fare and pulled in a thirtysomething crowd largely on the strength of
Tina Fey’s script — Lohan has yet to prove herself as a bankable movie
star. She has, on the other hand, proven herself to be a bankable
Internet search staple, where gossip hounds can follow with gape-jawed
glee her bad decisions on an almost daily basis.

While Just My Luck likely won’t rank as one of 2006’s worst
choices for Lohan, it’s hardly a becoming showcase, displaying the
starlet as it does in a seemingly distracted and too frequently
puffy-eyed light. The film centers on Lohan’s Ashley Albright, a young
Manhattanite publicist who meets good fortune at every turn (she was
once named prom queen at a high school she didn’t even attend),
much to the consternation of her friends, Maggie (Samaire Armstrong)
and Dana (Bree Turner). When a chance kiss at a costume party with the
unlucky but unfailingly nice Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) causes a switch
in their providence, Ashley finds her life turned upside down, and
tries to track Jake down to reverse the curse.

Director Donald Petrie turns in an utterly workmanlike effort here,
and the script — which namedrops Sarah Jessica Parker in its quest to
be taken as a sort of Sex in the City for the teenage set, and
thinks a character asking “Where’s my bun?” and then pulling a round
hairpiece-as-trivet out of the oven when so directed is the apex of
cleverness — doesn’t do anyone many favors. Lohan never really breaks
through in charming fashion and the result is a drab, uninteresting
mess.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Just My Luck is presented on
a flip disc that includes both full screen and 1.85:1 anamorphic
widescreen versions of the movie, the latter of which preserves the
aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. Special features
include three excised scenes — one deleted and two extended — a rather
yawn-inducing eight-minute look at the filming of the movie’s pivotal
concert sequence with real band McFly, and a brief,
two-minutes-and-change featurette on the film’s fashion that still
manages to baffle when costume designer Gary Jones talks about Lohan “growing into the dress in the fitting room, and becoming inspired by
the visual possibility of the movie.” Umm… what?! D (Movie) C- (Disc)