Lucky Numbers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Like this year's presidential campaign, this movie invites smart people to feel superior to it, while the dummies search fruitlessly for its heart and brain. A financially strapped TV weatherman (John Travolta) tries to rip off the state lottery while basking smugly in his local celebrity. Lisa Kudrow is hilarious as his permanently irate accomplice, and Bill Pullman is divinely clueless as the dopey cop pursuing them. It is all, again like our politics, occasionally funny but mostly desperate, small-minded and uncompelling.

--By Richard Schickel