Just My Luck (PG)

ANDREW CLARKE

Teenage actress-cum-role model-cum-pop star Lindsay Lohan has developed her career by playing feisty schoolgirls who are essentially good people coming to terms with who they are and dealing with the corrupting influences from the outside world.

This is the ongoing formula which has made such unpromising movies such as the remake of Freaky Friday, Mean Girls and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen into highly-profitable, half-decent movies.

Following the age-old Hollywood maxim of "if it ain't broke don't fix it", this latest movie takes Lindsay Lohan out of the schoolyard and into the workplace now that she has hit her twenties and she plays essentially the same character.

Instead of being the likeable student, she is now the likeable young office girl in a high-powered music industry publicity firm. It's one of those wish-fulfilment movies where office juniors live in extraordinarily expensive apartments and spend their evenings going out to record company parties in very expensive designer clothes which even the most senior executives might think twice about buying.

But, hey, this is a Cinderella tale designed exclusively for young teenage girls to get lost in. It's a fantasy in the same way that Fast and Furious is a teenage boys' wish-fulfilment movie. If you allow one you have to allow the other. Lohan's character, personal assistant Ashley Albright, is a girl blessed with extraordinarily good luck. Witness the fact that when she steps out of her apartment building, the pouring rain suddenly dries up. In her office her two best friends from high school also work there and they are all chums together (It really is a teenage girl wish-fulfilment fantasy).

Ashley is also resourceful. When a major record industry mogul turns up for a meeting and Ashley's bitchy boss Peggy Braden (Missi Pyle) fails to show, she conjures up a publicity campaign out of her own head and wins the contract - much to Peggy's grudging admiration.

As a result, Ashley gets a promotion, an office of her own and an unlimited company credit card from Peggy with the clear expectation that she will fail.

She doesn't, she's the luckiest girl in the world… until that is she kisses the unluckiest lad in the world at a record company bash she has organised and all her good luck is suddenly transferred to him.

The band he is managing (McFly) suddenly go from Stateside no-hopers to landing a high-profile record contract and staging a sell-out gig.

For Ashley, now nothing goes right and in a single evening she is fired from her job and lands up in jail.

Fortunately, her old school mates are there to stand by her and give her sage advice while she tours New York trying to find the man who stole her good fortune.

Don't try and make sense of this - it will only give you a severe headache. Lindsay Lohan is her usual dependable self but no one is required to stretch themselves. In fact, the presence of the extremely wooden real-life band McFly gives the film an air of surrealism. It frequently looks like an old episode of The Monkees.

It's the sort of film where their popster's writer's block is instantly cleared when Ashley's friend comes along with a hit tune which they memorise and arrange in an instant. No rehearsal, no getting the chord progression right, no false starts, no out-takes - it's a case of "let's get it down in one" and off they go.

Don't expect reality, but for its starry-eyed teenage audience it's a modern re-make of Cinderella with their favourite Hollywood heroine, living a life they would love to share and with some cool-looking pop stars thrown in for good measure.

A perfect antidote for all those girls young and old who want something to distract them from all this football.