An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even if it was nothing mind-blowing, I thought it was still a decent feelgood feature based on a cute and actually even inspiring true story. The funny thing was how, even 10 years later, Bryan Cranston apparently still struggled to take some distance from Walter White, obviously his most iconic role. Indeed, while Walter White was a mild-mannered genius chemist underestimated by everyone who would become the best crystal meth maker ever, Jerry Selbee was a mild-mannered genius mathematician underestimated by his everyone who figured out a way to basically cheat with the lottery. At least, this time, it didn’t become so dark like in ‘Breaking Bad’. However, even if the whole thing was rather predictable and not original whatsoever, I did like the fact that his goal was never to get filthy rich and instead, right from the start, he decided to share his good fortune with his whole small town. On the other hand, the whole conflict with the Harvard team (which was probably made up for this movie) was rather boring. Sure, I understand that they needed some kind of antagonist to generate some conflict but this approach was rather lame. In fact, I would have expected the lottery company to become the bad guys but they actually didn’t care which was interesting and I wish they developed this more instead of going for some bogus conflict with another betting group. It was also rather disappointing that the Selbees as characters were barely developed at all. Indeed, who was Jerry Selbee? Eventually, you never really get to know the guy after all but, with Marge Selbee, it was even worse and Annette Bening was pretty much wasted here. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, at least, if you like the genre. 

6/10