Lucky Numbers

2000 "When they put their heads together... it's a no brainer."
5.1| 1h45m| R| en| More Info
Released: 27 October 2000 Released
Producted By: Paramount
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

Russ Richards is a TV weatherman and local celebrity on the verge of losing his shirt. Desperate to escape financial ruin, he schemes with Crystal the TV station's lotto ball girl to rig the state lottery drawing. The numbers come up right, but everything else goes wrong as the plan starts to unravel and the game turns rough.

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Reviews

Lawbolisted Powerful
ShangLuda Admirable film.
Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!
Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
charley-baltimore With comedies, some things are funny and hit your funny bone just right and others don't for whatever reason. I particularly enjoy a tongue in cheek style dialog like the one in this movie. Travolta plays a self important weatherman on a cheesy news program and is so clueless, he becomes charming. I think this film is clever, campy, intelligent and sardonic and I loved it. I have seen it many times and it is still very entertaining. For the record it is crude and there are strippers, hit men, tacky sex scenes and some language but it is always making fun of itself so the crudeness is not really that offensive in my opinion. Lisa Kudrow and Travolta are truly funny together and the other actors add a lot to the film, they are so well cast. I looked up the writer of this film and wonder why he has not written more comedies- as he is really witty here.
Robert J. Maxwell Both John Travolta and Lisa Kudrow are television personalities in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He's a weather anchor. On the side, he runs a car dealership and he's stocked up on snowmobiles praying for a snowy winter from Gracious Providence, but not having anticipated the winter's warmth. She's the glitzy girl who pulls balls out of a machine to determine the state's winning lottery number. Neither is going anywhere.With the aid of their friend, Tim Roth, who manages a strip bar and restaurant, they concoct a scheme to win the lottery by distracting the Security Guard and injecting certain balls with a liquid that makes them heavier than others.Of course they can't present the winning ticket themselves. It might look funny. So they enlist the help of Kudrow's idiot cousin, Michael Moore, who dies of status asthmaticus at an awkward time. And, similarly, Tim Roth drags in some avaricious goons for some dirty work that later developments demand.It's a promising story, by Adam Resnik, and director Nora Ephron picks up the ball and runs with it. As comedy, this is about as black as it gets. It's a black comedy with characters adhering to nothing but hypothetical imperatives. What do I get out of it? There's nothing morally wrong with murder except that it leads to the inconvenient presence of dead bodies that must then be accounted for and disposed of.The dialog sparkles with cynical wit. Michael Moore is rapturous describing the joys of masturbation, while eying his cousin's breasts.Travolta is surprisingly good as the phony pitchman for snowmobiles and weather. And Kudrow is delicate and pretty in a quirky way. There's something bird-like about her long neck and darting glances, something that reminds one of an emu.Decent comedies rarely get the approval they deserve. Perhaps the comedy market is glutted with too much raunch that it not, in itself, funny. This one deserves applause.
Jessica Carvalho I was surprised to notice how many famous personalities are in this film! To start Lisa Kudrow and Jonh Travolta, but also Bill Pullman,Ed O'Neill,Daryl Mitchell and even Michael Moore! (this last one was really a surprise to me, I could not imagine Michael Moore as an actor!) The soundtrack is also great. (Queen rules!)The year is 1988.The weatherman, Russ Richards (Jonh Travolta)is broke,since he's borrowed heavily to open a snowmobile dealership. But he has a big problem: The temperature is not helping, and he didn't sell any snowmobile. One day his pal Gig,owner of a strip tease club, advises him to run an insurance scam. But it failed, and Russ only get more problems, specially with Dale, the guy contracted to destroy Russ's store. The funniest thing is that Russ is getting more and more problems,specially after he makes a deal with Crystal, the woman that works in the lottery and TV.
TxMike It was refreshing to see Travolta play a reluctant, unsophisticated crook for a change. Here he is a small TV station weatherman, adored by all the locals, and who also has a snowmobile dealership. The year is 1988 and the winter is unseasonably warm. No snowmobiles are being sold, and his home is about to be repossessed. He needs money but his boss is refusing this time. some SPOILERS FOLLOW - Small time numbers man (Tim Roth) suggests he stage a theft, and get the insurance money, "That money is yours, they are using your insurance premiums and earning interest on it." That fails miserably, he gets deeper in debt, this time to a burglar, and has to do something really desperate - rig the Pennsylvania lottery so he and his girlfriend (Kudrow) can split the $6.4Million, with the help of a masturbating and asthmatic cousin. Enough of the details, the scam works, sort of, but the cousin dies, others want their cut, all this time Travolta's character is scared and upset that he would actually do these things. In the end everyone else gets killed or otherwise in trouble, he gets the extremely dumb waitress at Denny's, his favorite breakfast spot, to cash in the ticket and they move to warmer climate of Florida. Sometimes you just have to have a bit of "Luck."This is the antithesis of all those Travolta movies (Face/Off, Broken Arrow, etc) where he plays the smart criminal who knows all the right moves, well almost all. Here he is not particularly bright, and is a very reluctant participant. I cannot say the movie is good, much of the dialog is haphazard, but it does entertain. With a smarter script, and in the hands of a different director, this premise could have been turned into a much better dark comedy on par with "Analyze That" or "The Whole Nine Yards." As it is, "Lucky Numbers" can entertain but its appropriate rating is around "5" or "6", about where the IMDb numbers are clustering now. The DVD is just OK, and the extras are not worth mentioning. Good light entertainment, if you are in the mood to be very forgiving of a bad script.