"Just My Luck" opened wide in the US on May 12, 2006, directed by Donald Petrie from a script built around a single fantastical hinge: a masquerade-ball kiss that swaps the fortunes of a charmed young publicist and an unlucky aspiring music producer.
Twenty years on, the anniversary is less a celebration than a chance to place the film honestly: a mid-2000s teen-skewing studio comedy that has mostly survived as a footnote to its stars' later careers.
Lindsay Lohan made the film at the peak of her teen-star run, coming off "Mean Girls" and her Disney-era hits, playing against type as Ashley Albright, a woman whose life runs on effortless good fortune until it doesn't. Chris Pine, cast opposite her as janitor and would-be producer Jake Hardin, was still three years from "Star Trek" and only two films into his career, and the film now reads as an early data point in a career that changed shape entirely once he was cast as Kirk in 2007.
The film's premise, luck itself as a transferable, almost physical substance, is a cleaner high-concept engine than the genre usually bothers with, and it lets Petrie stage its funniest stretches as pure slapstick. The device works best as visual comedy rather than as romance, and the film is more interesting as a showcase for physical misfortune than as a coupling of its two leads, whose chemistry is thinner than the concept demands.
Critics were unkind at the time and have not revised that view since: Rotten Tomatoes lists a 14 percent critics' score against a much warmer 48 percent audience rating, with Roger Ebert dismissing it as juvenile. What makes a first watch worthwhile now is almost entirely biographical: it's a clear artifact of Lohan's mid-2000s stardom and a curiosity for anyone charting Pine's path from supporting comic roles to "Star Trek."
