There’s a one-in-a-billion story to “Lottery Ticket”: Those are the approximate odds against a script this bad making it out of the introductory seminar at film school.
Bow Wow (no longer Lil, except in acting ability) plays Kevin, a polite and hard-working high school graduate who is so earnest about his job at the local Foot Locker that he irons his shoelaces. Buying a lottery ticket for his grandma, he decides on a whim to be free-spirited like his best friend Benny (Brandon T. Jackson) and get one for himself.
Kevin’s grandmother’s ticket misses. Kevin’s hits.
Now that Kevin’s $370 million richer on paper, he must elude violent thugs while keeping track of the ticket over a three-day Fourth of July weekend until he can cash it in on Tuesday morning.
The script can’t figure out in which direction to go, so it goes in all of them, staggering from cornball to crude and from silly to sinister. Kevin seems thoughtful (he tells neighbors, correctly, that lottery tickets are just a means of keeping poor people poor), yet when he wins the lottery he accepts a $100,000 cash loan from a local gangster (Keith David). Then he promptly blows the money on junk like a rare pair of Nikes.
This is not only shallow, but stupid: Parading around town with the money (the movie was filmed in Atlanta) only draws unwanted attention to Kevin, who has already had a run-in with a ruthless ex-con (Gbenga Akinnagbe).
The movie could work if it stuck to one tone and concentrated on Kevin’s learning to grow up and make the right choices, but all of his poor decisions are instead presented as larky fun. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a $100,000 shopping spree? Even if it may get you killed? Sure, whatever. And it’s not clear Kevin ever changes internally; for instance, he nearly sleeps with the local tramp, disgusting the good girl (Naturi Naughton) he has never quite managed to start a romance with. But he doesn’t walk away from the town tart because he realizes he’s made a mistake. He only does it because he thinks she’s trying to trick him into getting her pregnant.
Ice Cube’s well-worn performance as a wise old geezer is the only bright spot in a movie that otherwise fumbles every opportunity to be funny, exciting or insightful as it veers from feeble feel-good comedy to thin gangland drama. Says one character, “I need a girl I can take to, like, church and a strip club.” Like the movie, he needs to make up his mind.