Lottery Ticket

| 13 Aug 2014 | 06:20

    Lottery Ticket

    Directed by Erik White

    Runtime: 95 min.

    ICE CUBE, who produced Lottery Ticket, also plays a stealth father figure to its unmentored young black male hero, Kevin Carson (played by the ever-appealing Bow Wow), who is stressed about what to do with his $370 million lottery winnings. Ribald rapper Cube may not have seen René Clair’s 1931 lottery masterpiece Le Million, but, as a film impresario, he captures some of its culturally-specific charm. Cube was born the year of Ousmane Sembene’s 1968 classic Mandabi (Lottery Ticket), and though it’s doubtful he ever saw it either, he yet evokes some of that film’s sense of community.

    I love that Cube celebrates both his European and African heritage. Lottery Ticket is a natural result of his genuine and authentic cultural instincts—which are missing in the P.C. films Denzel Washington produces merely to exploit African-American pieties. Lottery Ticket can be most richly enjoyed as a diaspora comedy. It follows some of the archetypal human predicaments that the most serious artists depict when setting out to amuse. Cube reminds audiences of their best potential, even while drawing a bead on greed and materialism.

    The only problem with Cube’s new movie is that it doesn’t delve deeper into cultural tradition or past ethnic cliché. Rather, Lottery Ticket repeats too much of the fight-the-bully formula that served Cube so well 15 years ago when he started the Friday series about fecklessness in the hood. Still, this Atlanta-set story shows the charm of a folk fable in the way Kevin relates to his race (Brandon T. Jackson), women (the great Naturi Naughton), thugs (the sizzling Gbenga Akinnagbe) and even the perfectly satirized shyster preacher (reliably funny Mike Epps). Like Clair and Sembne, the issue of money never overtakes humanity, but tests it.