Good Luck Chuck

Pass…., January 17, 2008

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) –

  

  

  

  

Having seen Dane Cook as a stand-up comedian and been entertained by his humor and delivery, GOOD LUCK CHUCK seemed like an innocuous brainless evening entertainment. Unfortunately the story and script and direction are so sub par that even the most devoted of potty mouth movie fans will likely find this dud a bore. Hopefully Cook will be given better material for his next outing.

The story is meager but deals with a childhood hex placed on Cook’s character, dentist Charlie Logan, which prevents him from finding lasting love: every woman with whom he sleeps (and there are countless encounters in the buff on endless multi-screen images) will marry the man she meets after her liaison with ‘good luck’ Charlie Logan. His obnoxious breast augmenter best friend Stu (Dan Fogler) sees Chuck’s hex as a godsend for open sex, but when Chuck meets Klutz penguin trainer (Jessica Alba) and falls in love, there are problems – the solutions of which are so disgusting and unfunny that hardly need repeating.

This is a film, apparently with an audience (!), that is gross and so over the top that it completely wastes the talents of Cook and Alba. The film is being advertised as the ‘chance to extensively see Dane Cook in the buff’, but even that is an overstatement. Maybe if the viewer is on strong drugs….No, probably not even then. Pass on this one. Grady Harp, January 08

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This is not a romantic comedy because there is not that much romance in it, January 17, 2008

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Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) –

  

  

  

  

“Good Luck Chuck” is not a romantic comedy, but rather a raunchy comedy that is sort of about romance. If there was some notion of romance at the heart of this movie, it would have a chance of working, but of the different organs and body parts that are prominent in this 2007 film, the heart would not be one of them. When we get to the big moment at the end of “Good Luck Chuck,” compare it to the same scene in “The Wedding Singer,” and you can see how short this one falls of the mark. In other words, this is really not a date film, because first-time director Mark Helfrich’s final product is slanted way towards the male of the species. You might check this film out for Jessica Alba, but the focus is on Dane Cook and that along should tell you this movie is going to favor comedy over women, and comedy that favors men over women.

That is not to say that the premise is not promising. The titular Chuck is Charlie Logan (Cook), and, no, the film is not bothered by the fact that nobody calls him Chuck. Because of what happened during an adolescent game of Spin the Bottle, Charlie is cursed: any woman he loves will leave him and immediately find and marry the man of her dreams. As Charlie comes to realize his peculiar situation there is good news–women are throwing themselves at him in order to leap out of his bed and find the guy for them–and bad news–he meets Cam Wexler (Alba), who is cute, a klutz, and works with penguins, allowing the film to show how far the penguin fever of “March of the Penguins”, “Happy Feet,” et al., has fallen. More importantly, she looks like Jessica Alba, so we instantly understand why Cam is a keeper from Charlie’s perspective, even if his best friend Stu (Dan Fogler), a plastic surgeon whose practice is limited to boob jobs, probably thinks too little of her. This creates the ultimate paradox for Charlie, because to love this woman is to lose her, which is a pretty interesting Catch-22.

I am sure that if I added up the minutes that Charlie really does spend more time with Cam than he does with Stu, but it sure does not feel that way. But the real problem in this film comes in the sequences that it is proudest of: the sex montage. There is a whole special feature devoted to it as the “Sex Matrix.” My immediate reaction to all of this was to wonder if I had ever seen a motion picture with more naked women in it than this one, and while I am sure I have this is a concerted effort in “Good Luck Chuck” to prove otherwise. But when you are watching a guy have sex with dozens of women, it is hard to lend credence to the idea that he is really in love with the woman he is not having sex with. To offer a rejoinder to Stu, while it is true that sex without love is still sex, it is still without love, and love is supposed to be at the heart of a romantic comedy, which is why this film is not one.

My favorite romantic comedy of recent vintage is probably “50 First Dates,” and I gave that one only four stars because the raunchy stuff with Rob Schneider took away from the wonderful stuff happening with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. But “Good Luck Chuck” is following more in the steps of contemporary comedies like “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” where the goal is to produce a unrated DVD edition. So “50 First Dates” is now looking more like a classic romantic comedy to me. If “50 First Dates” had been made the way they made “Good Luck Chuck,” then the opening montage of past lovers in the former would have been in the middle, in which case they are no longer past lovers and the decks are not cleared for a real romance. By the time Charlie and Cam get to anything remotely like the romantic part, it is too little too late. When you get to the last in a long line of women, it is hard not to focus on the long line rather than the last woman. The screenplay by Josh Stolberg (“Kids in America“) does come up with a decent enough way of resolving the dilemma, but given everything that has come before it, the ending fails to redeem this movie.

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