Reel Images Magazine

Don’t get it twisted, Lil Bow Wow has done far worse things in his career (read: Roll Bounce and “Puppy Love”), but relative to our respect for Shad Moss as an artist the only quality he brings to this role is an inherent likability. Then again, that’s more than you can say for the rest of the film. Ultimately, Lottery Ticket is good for a few cheap laughs, though from a comedic sense perhaps it hinges too much on the same jokes Mike Epps, Charlie Murphy and Terry Crews have been making for decades. At what point is it time for some new material? Can it be that urban culture remains unchanged over the course of history while the wide world constantly shifts around it? Certainly not. Before forcing another played out slapstick down should’ve-been-expecting-it viewer’s throats, at least have the common courtesy to come up with some new material. Billed as perhaps the most wholesomely relatable African-American comedy since Barbershop, almost everything about Lottery Ticket fell short of such promise, closer to Barbershop 2 rather, which is far less complementary. (more…)