Just My Luck (2006)

It's tough to be a star in the age of ultra-gossip. Lindsay Lohan's junior-diva party-girl rep has recently eclipsed her appeal as an actress, but before we get too judgmental about her boogie nights at Bungalow 8, take one look at her in the new comedy Just My Luck. That mischievous pixie sparkle. That flame-red coif that sets off her madonna face just so. That smile with its hint of an Audrey Hepburn overbite...

There's plenty of beauty in Hollywood, but Lindsay Lohan's sexiness is suffused with soul. So far, though, she's grown up faster than her movies. Just My Luck features Lohan in her first ''adult'' role, but it's really a piece of teenybopper junk, a variation on Freaky Friday buffed with a bit of 13 Going on 30's yuppie-career-princess gloss. She plays Ashley, a junior PR executive who happens to be the luckiest woman in the world. The rain turns to sunshine the moment she steps out of her apartment; right before a date, a designer dress meant for Sarah Jessica Parker mistakenly arrives at her door. Then she meets her opposite number, an aspiring band manager, played by the more dogged than charming Chris Pine, whose life is a bombardment of slapstick catastrophes. Just My Luck starts off as a clunky cartoon. Then the two characters exchange fates, and the movie flip-flops and becomes a different cartoon, this one just as vacuously mechanical. It takes skill, and a certain humanity, to rescue a premise this gimmicky; Just My Luck lacks both. Yet even in her dullest vehicle, Lindsay Lohan exudes an unfakable shine.

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