george-43710 I don't know why this movie has such a low rating. It wasn't the best thing i ever seen but there were worse ones for sure. The game of hot potato made me chuckle a bit but that's about all i can say about this "comedy". I din't laugh for the most part but the intention was there. I never wondered how much is left so i guess that's a good thing. A bit silly, a bit funny and a lot average. 6/10

SnoopyStyle It's 1988 Harrisburg PA. Russ Richards (John Travolta) is a local TV celebrity weatherman and he's broke after opening a snowmobile dealership. His shady friend Gig (Tim Roth) suggests an insurance scam but it goes wrong and Russ gets further in trouble with hit-man Dale (Michael Rapaport). Gig's next scheme is to rig the state lottery with the help of his amoral girlfriend Crystal Latroy (Lisa Kudrow) who pulls the numbers on TV. They actually succeed at winning the jackpot and station manager Dick Simmons (Ed O'Neill) tries to blackmail them. Mayhem ensues and detectives Lakewood (Bill Pullman) and Chambers (Daryl Mitchell) are forced to investigate.This isn't funny even as a black comedy. Nora Ephron just doesn't have the feel for this comedy sub-genre. She is better off sticking with her usual brand of humor. The plot is a rambling mess. The characters are more annoying than actually funny. It is simply not funny and very tiresome.

fedor8 Well, well, well...Many people were curious what would be Travolta's follow-up stinker to his previous MEGA-stinker, "Battlefield Earth: The Saga Of A Dumb Hollywood Scientologist". And he didn't disappoint: "Lucky Numbers" is a piece of crap, not quite the kind of highly enjoyable garbage like that little intellectual exercise written by "Elron" Hubbard, but nevertheless trash of the highest order. Not to be enjoyed in any way, but marveled.1: the movie was utterly unfunny. 2: it was supposed to be a comedy. 1 + 2 = an embarrassment to all involved, to the viewer and to the maker of this crap.The plot is supposedly based on true events, yet so much in this movie smells of phoniness. It lacks realism. Besides, any film that has Michael Moore (a bad propaganda-movie maker and even worse actor and director) in its list of cast members can't have much chance of being quality stuff.Having realized after the first 10 minutes that this movie is going to be relentless in its pursuit of unfunniness, I was half-hoping that Travolta would once again introduce the concept of "leverage" into the plot. (Leverage was an essential tool used by aliens in "B.E.", riveting stuff, I assure you.) I thought maybe John's character could try to find out what Roth's character likes to eat and send him on a quest for rat - as happened in the afore-mentioned bomb.Forget his movies for a second if you can - and something tells me that LN is easy to forget (or at least advisable). The only thing I want to know now is how such a brilliant mind, such as Travolta undoubtedly has, can learn to fly an airplane? Is he an idiot savant? Or is learning to fly much easier than I thought? (MUCH easier.) Dear John, go back to your plans of making a sequel to your wonderfully inept "Battlefield Earth" saga. All us fans of that Edwoodsian mega-flop are praying (even though I'm an atheist!) that you make that follow-up stinker - and you promised you would!

george.schmidt LUCKY NUMBERS (2000) * John Travolta, Lisa Kudrow, Tim Roth, Ed O' Neill, Michael Rapaport, Daryl Mitchell, Bill Pullman, Michael Moore, Richard Schiff, Michael Weston. (Dir: Nora Ephron)Weatherman never seem to get any proper respect and I'm sure you'll agree that whenever you click onto the local daily newscast with the award-winning team that when they finally get around to the announcement of their weatherman it is often with a false laugh and a couldn't-care-less disdain tone in their voices. Like Steve Martin in `L.A. Story' and Bill Murray in `Groundhog Day', John Travolta plays a hapless forecaster with a yen to something better.The something for Russ Richards (Travolta), Harrisburg, PA's local celebrity weatherman, it is a desire to become a game show host by any means necessary (echoes of `To Die For') which leads him to shirk his big-fish-in-a-small pond status and his going nowhere snowmobile sales dealership that is floundering ironically due to unseasonably warm weather for the winter. Russ, up to his neck in debt with a 30 day foreclosure on his house and his taste for a sporty Jag to tool around in to his private booth at the local Denny's (featuring the Russ Richards Omelette), conspires with his mistress Crystal (Kudrow, finally breaking away from her ditsy Emmy winning role as Phoebe on the sitcom blockbuster `Friends'), the lottery girl at the tv station, and his good buddy Gig (Roth) the proprietor of a strip club, to rig the state lottery with a surefire scheme to win the $6.4 M stake at hand. What follows is a domino effect of comedic errors that don't exactly provide guffaws or for me, even a smile. The fact that the trio pull it off is a miracle in itself but when their not so ingenious plan backfires the daisy-chain of events builds up with no big payoff. Characters are sloppily thrown in - Crystal's asthmatic, masturbating (thankfully off-screen) cousin Walter (rabble-rousing filmmaker Moore who provides some limited humor) is introduced as the dupe to cash in the winning claim ticket; Mitchell and Pullman as respectively an overzealous by-the-book rookie and slacker police team investigating the crime(s) at hand (Pullman seems to be doing a variation of his `stupidest man alive' character from `Ruthless People'); local bookie (Schiff, completely wasted in a pointed cameo); Rapaport cornering the cottage industry has set himself up for on another variation of mindless streetwise thugs as Dale The Thug (I'm not making that up either!) - while the threadebare plot by veteran comedy scribe Adam Resnick (including `The Larry Sanders Show' and Chris Elliott's cult sitcom classic `Get A Life') is staggeringly ill-conceived (based loosely on the real-life 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery fix) from the get go. Travolta, who has been in a string of flops for some time now since his Phoenix from the ashes revival in 1994's `Pulp Fiction', does what he can but his Russ is a one-dimensional character with shades of grey alluded to and all but force fed by the film's 180 degree turn at the end. After all he did get his big break in comedy in the classic Seventies' sitcom `Welcome Back, Kotter' as the vacuous leader of the sweathogs, iconic Vinnie Barbarino which proved he could make people laugh effortlessly. Here it's like watching him dance under water; gracelessly. Kudrow, who is an underrated comic actress (witness the indie hit `The Opposite Sex' for her bilious turn as a sexually frustrated schoolteacher surviving by her wits) and can act (ditto `Friends'), and even though she has shedded her alter ego of airheaded genius, her conniving Crystal is very unlikable and pretty ugly (which I suppose is the point). Filmmaker Ephron has had an equally unequal track record from her excellent screenplay of `When Harry Met Sally.' to her bomb directorial debut `Mixed Nuts' and the disastrous `Hanging Up' (co-starring Kudrow) this year as well, that maybe she should focus on one instead of both careers. The film overall feels half-baked and a hybrid of a crime drama and a black comedy ( I guess) of `A Simple Plan' and the aforementioned `Ruthless People' which only appears to be unlucky in the end run.