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Twelve hours is a long time to sit on a plane. Believe me. I know. Eventually, you come to a point where you flip through the movie listings on your personal in-flight entertainment center and realize that you’ve seen pretty much everything. You’re down to either a Lindsay Lohan movie or a handful of foreign films, which would require you to read subtitles on a tiny screen. So you choose Lindsay. Or at least I did.
In Just My Luck, L-Lo stars as Ashley Albright, the girl who has everything. Ashley has always been the luckiest girl around—and no matter what she does, everything just goes right for her. The richest, most gorgeous guys ask her out. The rain stops just as she steps outside. Her coworkers get stuck in an elevator, leaving her alone to wow their biggest client. Nothing can possibly go wrong for Ashley.
For Jake Hardin (Chris Pine), on the other hand, nothing ever goes right. He’s got the worst luck ever—which is why he’s still living in an apartment with his family and fixing toilets at the bowling alley. He also manages a great band—but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to get them their big break.
One night, Jake sneaks into a masquerade party for a big record exec—a party that Ashley is hosting. The two kiss on the dance floor—and Ashley’s luck passes on to Jake. When Ashley figures out that her luck disappeared the moment she kissed the mysterious masked guy at the party, she recruits her friends to help her figure out who he was—so she can get her luck back.
I’ll grudgingly admit that there have been a couple of Lindsay Lohan movies that I actually enjoyed. I thought Herbie: Fully Loaded was cute. I liked Freaky Friday. In fact, no matter how tired I am of reading the latest L-Lo gossip, I actually tend to like her when she shows up on the big screen. But not this time. Her character isn’t the least bit likeable. In fact, Ashley is a lot like the spoiled-party-girl Lindsay you’ll find in the glossy gossip mags. Instead of feeling bad for her “bad luck,” I figured she got what she deserved. And the story doesn’t help her cause, either. I mean, really…who drops a contact lens in kitty litter and puts it back in her eye without cleaning first—and then gets upset when it hurts her eye, forcing her to wear an eye patch on her hot date? That’s not bad luck—that’s stupidity. As is dumping an entire box of detergent in the washer and running it anyway (Hold on—didn’t I see that exact scene on The Brady Bunch?). Pine isn’t much better as Jake—and the two have absolutely no on-screen chemistry.
While this movie may have passed a couple of hours on my 12-hour flight, I would have been better off trying to read the subtitles on those foreign films—or perhaps having a conversation with the loud, obnoxious kid behind me, who spent the flight telling stories about buying cheap hammocks in Thailand. He probably would have been less annoying.
