'Bridesmaids' director Paul Feig directs a rare action film where the action is actually comedic, but he can't fix the film's larger script problems.

The ceiling is low in the action-comedy category — a genre whose biggest hits tend to pepper bloodless gunfights with jokes from former “Saturday Night Live” stars. With Prime Video entry “Jackpot!”, director Paul Feig switches up the formula, creating stunt-heavy set pieces where the action itself makes you laugh. That could mean anything from Awkwafina hiding among the wax figures in a tacky Hollywood museum to ex-wrestler John Cena’s face taking on a roomful of black belts with the “Crazy Rich Asians” outbreak emblazoned on his back.

Why are people trying to kill Awkwafina? “Jackpot!” asks its audience to go along with a clever but often illogical premise about a radical rule change to the California lottery. In the year 2030, the winning ticket comes with a prize: the money can only be kept if you survive until the sun sets. In the meantime, winners must play out a makeshift Hunger Games on the streets of Los Angeles, in which their winnings double as a kind of reward, awarded to whoever is smart enough to kill them.

No offense to Rob Yescombe (who was named one of Variety’s Screenwriters to Watch last year), but that idea is about as far as he gets in a scrappy screenplay that’s further buoyed by whatever improvisation the cast can muster and surprisingly funny fight scenes. Feig shows how the state’s win-lose-or-die lottery works from the get-go, as that day’s winner (Seann William Scott) tries to outrun a greedy mob. The rules seem fairly straightforward, which makes it hard to stomach that Awkwafina doesn’t know what’s going to happen when her number is drawn.