Lucky Numbers

You won't see this baby being promoted as coming to you "from the star of Battlefield Earth and the writer of Cabin Boy," but if you did, it might still disappoint, simply because it's boring. Director Nora Ephron seems ill-suited to black comedy; she cares too much about her characters to allow any major harm to come to them, with the exception of a couple of paper-thin caricatures who are set up to be knocked down. The idea is promising enough: Spoiled local celebrity Russ Richards (John Travolta, looking more gay than ever), is facing house foreclosure, and his snowmobile dealership is being ruined by a freak winter heatwave. He tries to set up a fake robbery in order to gain some insurance money, but the plan goes awry, leaving him even deeper in the hole and indebted to a reckless psycho named Dale the Thug (Michael Rapaport). Unable to procure any stupid man-animals who'll mine gold while eating dead rats and expanding their minds, he instead hits upon the next best thing: enlisting his sometime girlfriend and local lottery girl Crystal (Lisa Kudrow) to rig the state lottery. That part turns out to be rather easy. But collecting the winnings is the hard part, especially when the plan depends upon Crystal's simple-minded cousin (documentarian Michael Moore, in a rare acting role), a local strip-club owner with shady ties (Tim Roth), and Russ' sleazy boss, Dick (Ed O'Neill), who also happens to be sleeping with Crystal. The actors are all game, but Adam Resnick's script is flat, failing to provide a sense of escalating tension or much humor, and relying primarily on endless profanity for cheap laughs. It doesn't help matters that Travolta's no Nic Cage or John Cleese when it comes to playing volcanic frustration -- he hits the mark exactly once, during an absurd exchange centered on The Wizard of Oz.