MOVIE REVIEW

Just her luck, Lohan picks the wrong vehicle to grow up in.

By Gene Seymour, Newsday

In the long run, Lindsay Lohan will do just fine. Really, the girl's got skills. "Freaky Friday"? She rocks, right? "Mean Girls"? What a hoot!

And you don't get asked to host "Saturday Night Live" more than once if you don't know how to read and react to funny stuff. That is, if she's given funny stuff to read and react to — which, sad to say, didn't happen much on that most recent "SNL" she hosted. So if you want to see what star potential looks like, rent the two movies cited above and stay as far away from "Just My Luck" as you can.

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Too bad Lohan couldn't run away from it in time. All this so she could play someone who's not a teenager? And this is what playing "grown-up" will be like for her? Hoo-boy!

Karma. That's what it is. And that's what this so-called comedy is supposed to be about. Lohan is cast as the prosaically named Ashley Albright, a fast-tracking junior executive with a snazzy public relations firm. As one of her friends puts it, the lucky stick hit Ashley hard from birth. Bad juju never lands on her dappled shoulders. Her polar opposite is Jake Hardin (Chris Pine), a sweet-natured klutz for whom every trapdoor and open manhole has a "drop in" sign just for him.

They're both so ridiculously conceived that they just have to meet at a masquerade ball and kiss so hard that their fortunes do an immediate switcheroo. Jake suddenly finds himself a protégé of pop mogul Damon Phillips (Faizon Love deserves better too), while Ashley loses her job, her apartment, her wardrobe, her self-esteem.

The situation is supposed to allow Lohan to show what she can do as a physical comedian. But her every faux pas comes across as rank humiliation, and it can only be entertaining for sadistic mall rats who get their jollies seeing Miss Budding Superstar wallow in grime and slip on soap. The pedestrian pacing and the lummox-like staging don't help her or anyone else in her immediate vicinity.

One hears that Lohan is about to leave behind such flighty fare for heavier lifting and better vehicles; much better, in any case, than "Just My Luck." For her sake — and ours — that better be more than just a rumor.

*

'Just My Luck'

MPAA rating: PG-13 for some brief sexual references

A 20th Century Fox release. Director Donald Petrie. Screenplay I. Marlene King, Amy Harris. Story by Jonathan Bernstein & Mark Blackwell & James Greer, King. Producers Arnon Milchan, Arnold Rifkin, Petrie. Director of photography Dean Semler. Editor Debra Neil-Fisher. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

In general release.