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by R.J. Carter Published: August 16, 2006
Jake Harden (Chris Pine, "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement"), on the other hand, couldn't catch a break if the break were hogtied and sitting in his apartment. He has a humiliating job as a janitor/gopher for a bowling alley, he steps in things on the street, and gets injured by just about anything. He's the personification of Murphy's Law. But that doesn't break his optimism as he tries to promoting a new band, McFly, and get them recognized by music label mogul, Damon Phillips (Faizon Love, "Elf"). Jake and Ashley cross paths when Ashley's PR firm organizes a charity masquerade ball for Phillips' company. Jake crashes the party disguised as one of the dancers to get a CD into Phillips' hands. When he asks Ashley for a dance, she accepts and, in a magical moment on the dance floor -- they kiss. And everything changes for both of them. Almost immediately, Jake's luck changes for the better as he finds himself in a position to save Phillips' life, easily getting an opportunity to present McFly's music to a very receptive mover and shaker in the industry. Meanwhile, Ashley breaks a heel, rips her dress, and is arrested and fired.
Ashley begins piecing things together, triangulating the point at which her luck changed. With the help of a fortune teller, she realizes she lost it in the kiss to the dancer -- the masked dancer. What ensues is a stream of scenes with Ashley locating all the dancers who were hired for the party, kissing them, then checking her luck with scratch off tickets. But her luck doesn't return. During a domino effect of bad luck at a diner, she stumbles into Jake who recognizes all the signs of being the target of fate. He offers her a job -- his old one, at the bowling alley. There, Ashley still has bad luck, but we see her learning to adjust to it. When she later makes a delivery to Jake at the studio, Jake asks her out, but she declines thinking there's already a woman in Jake's life, before discovering that the Katy Jake speaks so endearingly to is his pre-teen buddy, played by Makenzie Vega ("Sin City"), who's just as luckless as Jake used to be. As their relationship progresses, Ashley learns that Jake needs a new song for the band to follow-up their first hit. Ta-da: Ashley's friend is a songwriter! It looks like her luck is back! But when she overhears Jake speaking later about how his luck did a complete 180 ever since he crashed the masquerade bash, she realizes that he's the one she kissed her luck away to. One kiss, and Ashley's luck is restored -- at the cost of the return of Jake's horribly bad luck, and at a critical juncture for his career. As the film reaches its climax, a guilt-ridden Ashley and her friends make a mad dash to find Jake and give the luck back. "If Jake's bad luck is half as bad as mine was, then we don't have much time," says Ashley. "Just My Luck" is an absolutely charming modern day fairy tale, possessing that "Freaky Friday" element of magic and played to perfection by every actor on the screen. The final solution to the dilemma was nicely unexpected and the perfect cap-off to one of the funnest date films of the year. McFly -- a real-life band, by the way -- provide several tracks to a killer pop soundtrack. This is a double-sided disc, with both widescreen anamorphic (1.85:1) and full screen (1.33:1) presentations. The special features are distributed among both sides, and include "The Look of Luck", a two-minute featurette with screenwriter I. Marlene King and the costume designers on getting the costumes to look just right. This featurette includes some dressing scenes of the actors trying on the various getups seen throughout the film. There are three deleted scenes that would have been right at home had they been incorporated into the film (one of which would have provided some nice connective tissue explaining how the girls identified who all the dancers were.) And there's an eight-minute bit that provides a 'making-of' look at the final concert scene with McFly. Audio settings include English 5.1 Dolby Surround, Spanish Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround, with optional subtitles in English and Spanish. Previews on this disc include "Aquamarine", "My Super Ex-Girlfriend", "The Devil Wears Prada", and "John Tucker Must Die". |
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