My World of Flops, Stormy Weather Case File #179 The Travolta/Cage Project #62 Lucky Numbers (2000)

What makes Adam Resnick such a brilliant dark humorist is that he genuinely seems to hate people. The darkness and pessimism in his work feels effortlessly authentic. He’s someone with genuine, richly merited contempt for humanity that comes through in everything that he does. 

That was my takeaway from Will Not Attend, a book of exquisitely misanthropic essays Resnick published in 2014 that barely touches upon his groundbreaking career as one of the preeminent architects of contemporary comedy but is hilarious and essential all the same. 

It’s not surprising that Resnick’s big projects have not succeeded commercially. It’s surprising that they got made in the first place, beginning with Get a Life, the show he co-created with Chris Elliott that made his name and reputation. 

Resnick and Elliott followed Get a Life with 1994’s Cabin Boy, which was a massive flop upon its release before becoming one of the major cult films of the 1990s. Resnick followed it up with the screenplay for 2000’s Lucky Numbers, which flopped at the time of its release and stubbornly refuses to develop a cult and 2002’s Death To Smoochy, which bombed big time en route to becoming a notable cult film in its own right. 

Lucky Numbers is the only film Nora Ephron directed that she does not have a screenwriting credit on. It feels like a bracingly dark, nasty anomaly in her filmography but is gloriously representative of Resnick’s malevolent wit and genius for cruelty-based comedy. 

Ephron specialized in blockbuster crowd-pleasers like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail but Lucky Numbers grossed a small percentage of its hefty sixty three million dollar budget and did even worse with audiences. 

Lucky Numbers proved spectacularly unlucky with audiences. It’s one of only four films released in 2000 to receive a dreaded F rating on Cinemascore, the lowest possible score. I would have given Lucky Numbers a low score when I reviewed it for the A.V Club at the time of its release but as is the case with seemingly everything I re-watch these days, what once left me cold now rocks my world. 

I’m not terribly surprised that Lucky Numbers got an F on Cinemascore because it is not the kind of movie you’re supposed to like. People think that if they laugh at a mean-spirited comedy about horrible people being awful to one another that makes them a bad person, or at least someone with malice in their soul, rather than people blessed with a dark sense of humor. Lucky Numbers is not a heartwarming tale of the triumph of the human spirit or a fact-based drama about the Holocaust. It’s a deliciously nasty black comedy with a deep hatred of its characters, its milieu and the world at large. 

In a pop culture realm unhealthily obsessed with likability, Lucky Numbers commits the most unforgivable crime of all: it is flagrantly, unapologetically and unashamedly unlikable, deliberately loathsome. 

Lucky Numbers is not entirely without crowd-pleasing elements. It does, for example, feature the spectacle of a minor supporting character played by Michael Moore dying of a fatal asthma attack onscreen, the life seeping out of him with each tortured breath, an image destined to delight Republicans and Liberals alike. 

Moore is on hand here in a rare acting role to talk extensively about masturbation, leer at his cousin’s alluring cleavage and then die a singularly undignified death. Yet audiences somehow saw fit to reject Lucky Numbers all the same! 

Lucky Numbers casts John Travolta, Ephron’s Michael muse, in a role he was born to play as Russ Richards, a small town Midwestern weatherman who loves being a very big fish in a very small pond. He gets off on having his very own table at the local Denny’s (where his waitress of choice is played by a very young Maria Bamford, radiating genius, madness and cracked vulnerability), where viewers can fawn over him and feed his rapacious ego.

Yet Russ dreams of more. With Arthur Fleck-like delusional determination, he’s intent on making the big leap from regional weather forecaster to national game show host. The deeply superficial television performer worships at the altar of Bob Barker and considers Gene Rayburn at least a minor deity. 

I’ve written extensively about how one of the crucial differences between Cage and Travolta as actors and movie stars is that Cage has the unique and rare gift of being totally himself onscreen while Travolta is great at playing glib phonies.

I am perpetually amazed by the unexpected commonalities of Cage and Travolta’s career. For example both actors played horny angels within a few years of each other AND they both played weathermen in perversely non-commercial flop comedies a mere half decade apart.

The role of Russ Richards, an ambitious idiot with a great smile and questionable hair, perfectly suits Travolta’s gift for playing smarmy bastards you can’t help but kind of love.  

Russ’ charmed life is threatened when an unusually long hot spell means doom for the snowmobile dealership he owns and operates with the help of Larry (Michael Weston), an earnest young man who appears to be his only employee. Though he cuts a strangely asexual figure, Larry’s disconcertingly intense libido keeps manifesting itself in unexpected ways. He’s a quietly inspired minor supporting character who keeps reverently quoting a hilariously verbose play that he wrote about Evel Knievel in the eight grade and has the kind of one-sided relationship with his boss where Russ can be brutally candid about instantly forgetting everything he tells him because nothing he has to say could possibly be worth remembering or paying attention to but because Russ delivers his icy put-downs with a big television smile the younger man has no choice but to be a good sport.

In desperation, Russ colludes to rig the lottery to the tune of over six million dollars at the suggestion of his icily pragmatic buddy Gig (a terrific Tim Roth, reuniting with his Pulp Fiction costar Travolta). 

To pull off the scam Russ needs the help of Crystal Latroy (Lisa Kudrow), a lottery girl in tight, low-cut sweaters that he is sleeping with when the opportunity presents itself. Kudrow throws herself into her character’s carefree sociopathy with complete conviction.

There’s a great moment when Russ finally musters up the courage to ask Crystal if she would be willing to break the law and embark on some felonies with him and Ephron cuts immediately from Russ beginning his spiel to Crystal literally shouting with glee over the millions she’s about to purloin. 

Russ is worried that being asked to rig the lottery will offend his lover morally but it turns out you have to possess morals in order to have moral objections and Crystal has a calculator where her heart and soul and conscience should be. 

Despite being sub-par criminals and sub-par human beings with sub-par IQs, the weather man and the lottery girl manage to pull off their scheme but in the grand tradition of darkly comic Neo-noirs like Fargo and The Ice Harvest, nothing goes quite according to plan. 

Crystal proposes that her creepy pervert cousin Walter (Michael Moore) buy the winning lottery ticket so he can cash it and share the money with his co-conspirators but when he gets greedy as well as pervy Crystal lets him die an agonizing and lonely death. 

Further complications present themself when another low life weirdo they’ve unwisely chosen to get into business with, the appropriately nicknamed Dale the Thug (Michael Rapaport, at his loathsome, stupid best) threatens them and ends up dead, as does and Jerry the Bookie (Richard Schiff, who absolutely destroys in his one scene). 

When Russ discovers that Jerry’s dead body has popped up unexpectedly from the newscast that employs him there’s a great shot of three televisions, one with the anchor delivering the bad news and the other two showing Russ with an animal-like expression of confusion and despair. 

Our incompetent anti-heroes’ sinister machinations brings them to the attention of Det. Pat Lakewood (Bill Pullman), a hilariously inept detective and even more incompetent criminal conniver. 

Lakewood rivals the world class dumb dumb Pullman played in the similarly nasty, similarly funny Ruthless People for sheer stupidity. Like a sloth, he exists to conserve energy at all costs. 

He needs to be continually reminded by his understandably annoyed partner Detective Chambers (a very funny Daryl Mitchell) that a detective’s job involves solving crimes, not merely recording their existence and then hunkering down for a long nap. 

As an action hero and romantic leading man Pullman can be a little bland but Lucky Numbers taps into his underrated flair for physical comedy and playing genial idiots.

Lucky Numbers starts bleak and just keeps on getting darker and darker as plans that were dicey to begin with proceed to unravel spectacularly and the bodies begin to pile up.

Resnick’s pitch-black exploration of small town malaise and criminality is easily one of the least loved and least successful films Ephron made. Yet in my estimation at least it’s also one of her best and funniest and certainly darkest movies. 

That’s why audiences ultimately rejected it. It’s a film that positively dares to be hated but also to be loved by a cult audience attuned to its weird, wonderful and unique frequencies. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success 

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