Paul Feig, Awkawfina, and John Cena Team Up to Try for an Action-Comedy Jackpot!

Is there a more beloved genre with a track record as bad as the American action comedy? Reinvigorated in the 1980s by the public’s desire to see Eddie Murphy be funny, but not that funny, in between stunts that are exciting, but not that exciting, the action comedy clung to the coattails of Beverly Hills Cop for at least a decade and a half past that movie’s release, and continues to make periodic comeback attempts. (Even Murphy himself has had difficulty getting the balance right since then.) Typically, even studiously following the formula results in movies too cacophonous to work as comedy, or too shticky to satisfy as action. (Not to mention the scant number of stars who can work in both genres at once.) Due credit, then, to Paul Feig’s new action-comedy romp, which also rampages through the posh environs of Beverly Hills: Jackpot! has no trouble integrating the two genres into sustained comic mayhem. In spirit, if not necessarily execution, this is the American version of an old Jackie Chan movie, where the action and the comedy become one and the same, not mismatched partners.

Feig and screenwriter Rob Yescombe arrive there, unexpectedly, by riffing on The Purge, perhaps comedy folks’ most beloved horror-movie premise. Here, in the not-too-distant future, an economically devastated California has enacted a monthly lottery with a huge payout and a grim gimmick: Once a winner is announced, other citizens have until sundown to attempt to kill that person (no guns or ammo allowed; close-quarters only). Any successful murderer will then be awarded the prize money instead, with no criminal repercussions for any participants. Into this mini-dystopia wanders Katie (Awkwafina), who rolls back into Los Angeles to resume her acting career after a long break, and unwittingly comes into possession of a winning ticket before even realizing that this death-game lotto exists.

Jackpot! doesn’t share Katie’s confusion, though it might be funnier if it did; instead, Jackpot! explains the whole deal upfront, detracting from the nightmare-logic surprise, and leaves Katie to eventually explain why she has no idea that her previous home state has its own Lotto Purge. (That reasoning is amusingly tossed-off, but might have been funnier if we were locked into Katie’s point of view). She explains this to Noel (John Cena), who arrives in the midst of the first, extended attack on Katie – at a skeezy casting office, naturally, joined by a yoga studio’s worth of fitness enthusiasts – to make her an offer: For 10% of her earnings, he’ll serve as her bodyguard, keeping her safe until sundown. Katie remains half-convinced she should just escape the state and abdicate the money, but the daft genius of this high-low concept is that it remains the same no matter what she decides: Cena and Awkwafina banter and battle their way through an endless supply of violent normies-turned-maniacs.

The heedless forward momentum of this premise gets Feig, whose comedies typically approach the two-hour mark, closer to a 90-minute runtime than anything he’s made since Unaccompanied Minors. His past experiments with the action-comedy form have always starred Melissa McCarthy, and though Awkwafina brings a different shade of half-cranky, half-melancholy haplessness to the proceedings, she’s not as graceful in motion or as off-the-cuff a wisecracker, prone to using her distinctively raspy tone to shout-force her punchlines. (At one point, she’s reduced to yelling “super-yacht!” over and over.) Still, she’s a good scene partner for Cena, who plays Noel as a capable badass whose polite good cheer makes him seem sweetly unhinged. (It’s a nice-guy version of Cena’s chiseled handsomeness.)

Feig’s actual staging of the movie’s slapstick attack isn’t exactly Hong Kong action-level; he and frequent editor Brent White cut around a lot, sometimes semi-nonsensically, and if the excuse is capturing the right one-liners and asides, the writing and/or line-o-rama improvising isn’t always strong enough to justify it. Still, Feig and his actors throw an impressive amount of goofball jokes, references and non sequiturs out in the heat of battle, especially when Katie squares off against her fellow actress and deceptive Airbnb host Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), hilariously blithe in her L.A. scenester uselessness (“I’m great at improv, I just need time to prepare!”). When the characters run amok in a low-rent wax museum, destroying ghoulishly inaccurate copies of the Kardashians for an “influencers” exhibit in pursuit of a $3B jackpot, the crazed energy transcends the sloppy choreography.

That energy dissipates a bit in the final stretch of Jackpot!, where Feig manages to approximate the feeling of a two-hour comedy running out of gas, even as this one circles the 100-minute mark. Potential for commentary on the grasping nature of economic desperation (and/or Hollywood status-seeking) gives way to poignant-backstory swaps, and the antagonist narrows to a slick and obviously sinister Simu Liu, playing an ex-colleague of Noel. At his heart, Feig isn’t really a satirist – or an action director, despite his repeated efforts. He still makes a convincing underdog, though, fighting his way through misbegotten genre that shouldn’t work here nearly as well as it does.

Director: Paul Feig
Writer: Rob Yescombe
Starring: Awkwafina, John Cena, Simu Liu, Ayden Mayeri
Release Date: August 15, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.