film | I'm retching over a four-leaf clover

In the grating comedy JUST MY LUCK, tabloid mainstay Lindsay Lohan plays the luckiest girl in new york, a PR assistant with a serious case of midas-itis: She lives in an impossibly gorgeous apartment, designer dry cleaning is accidentally delivered to her door the evening of a big date, she's never met a scratch-off lotto ticket she couldn't turn into a $20 score, and passing taxis screech to a halt whenever she steps onto the city curb. And then she smooches a handsome stranger (The Princess Diaries 2's Chris Pine) at a music-industry masquerade ball, and blammo: She snaps a stiletto in half, loses her posh job, gets electrocuted, and later winds up gangbanged by the San Diego Chargers after eating a burrito laced with mescaline. OK, that last bit never actually happens, but it sure would've enlivened the movie considerably if it did.

So yeah. Lohan's mystery man turns out to be a maintenance lackey at the local bowling alley who moonlights as the oafish manager to an unsigned british rock band (true-life recording artists McFly, very much enjoying the 103-minute commercial for their songs). He's also a walking broken mirror — crapped on by birds, splashed by street puddles, mistaken for a rapist when he collides with a female jogger and inadvertently drops his britches — and it looks as though he and Lohan swapped kismets as they canoodled, a farcical twist of fate that's not at all reminiscent of her hit Freaky Friday remake three years ago. Thus, while she combs the town in search of him, he goes from graceless nerd to suave jet setter, and she stumbles through mishaps with hairdryers and faulty shelving units that seem a mere mutilation away from one of those chain-reaction deathtraps of the Final Destination series.

Just My Luck fancies itself a younger, hipper Serendipity or Sleepless in Seattle, but the main problems with its romantic fantasy are that: A) the romantic part hinges on the movie's dollar-store interpretation of whimsy; and B) the fantasy elements are so over-the-top silly that they undermine any interest you might have in accepting the characters as real people. (I'm sorry, but if you drop your contact lens into a dirty litterbox and immediately stick it right over your cornea without washing it off, it's not misfortune. No, it's that you're a gigantic idiot who deserves to wear an ugly eyepatch.) The film wastes little time morphing into a mechanical parade of predictable set pieces that saps the buoyant charms Lohan showcased in 2004's brilliant Mean Girls. If she's hoping to mature into grown-up roles now that she's officially no longer a teenager, well, fine, I understand. But did she have to pick a vehicle for this transition that's more awkward than puberty? D