Good Luck Chuck

Anytime a movie stars Jessica Alba you can expect me to watch it. I may not enjoy the movie, but I will be there to cheer on the beauty that is Jessica Alba. I am also a fan of Dane Cook in the world of stand up comedy, but his first starring role in a comedy, Employee of the Month, was just an awful movie. However, the R rated comedy is very in right now and it was nice to see someone like Dane in one of them. The movie is probably the most promoted September movie I can remember with the two stars showing up everywhere, commercials everywhere and of course Myspace promoting the hell out of it since Dane Cook helped put Myspace on the map. But, September is usually full of big studio dump offs, meaning this where big studios unload their crappy movies. So how would this one fare?


In 1985 a young Charlie Logan (Dane Cook) is sent to spend "7 minutes in heaven" with a goth girl who is obsessed with him. He denies her advances and she puts a hex on him that he will never find true love because he won't be able to say "I love you" and each girl he breaks up with will fall in love with the next guy they date. The movie then turns to the present and we see this thing actually happening. Chuck is at a wedding of an ex-g/f when he starts to think people are going crazy with this whole good luck charm business and he also meets Cam Wexler (Jessica Alba) at the wedding. Cam is a gorgeous but clumsy girl who lives for penguins. After the wedding someone on Perfectmatch.com posts a little blurb about "Good luck Chuck" and soon his dentist office is bombarded by beautiful women looking to have sex with him. His best friend Stu (Dan Fogler) convinces him to have all kinds of sex with all kinds of girls, which he does, until he gets disillusioned by sexing up these girls who aren't even thinking of him. He is still thinking about Cam, they go on a date or two and start to make that connection, but the "charm" comes into play as Chuck thinks he cannot sleep with her or she will move on. The rest of the movie is a kind of tug-of-war with Chuck and his charm/curse and how it effects a relationship.


I have to admit that this movie is totally okay. It has some really great laughs but it has as many jokes miss as hit. Cook is a charming guy on camera and here he gets to do his Dane Cook stuff a bit as his flirting with Cam often sounds like it could be injected in his stand up. He also has two great side gags, one dressed as a penguin and one during the closing credits that you have to see for yourself. Alba proves herself to be better at pratfalls than actual acting and every guy loves to see a hot girl who is not afraid of looking foolish and Alba spends an awful lot of this movie looking foolish. From hitting her head, chipping her tooth, awkward phone sex voice and a few other embarrassing things, she comes off still lovely as ever and continues to tease the world with almost nudity. The four minute montage of Cook sexing various girls is often times humorous and at times kind of hard to watch. The love story unfolds in the same fashion as every romantic comedy with the big conflict coming right after they finally have sex, so from that point on it does take a very conventional approach to romantic comedies. The side plots don't really work as we don't care much about Chucks friend, Stu or his masturbatory ways and most of the minor characters are painfully pointless and unfunny.


This movie earns it's R rating as well. Be warned that there is an awful lot of breasts on display and a lot of Dane Cook ass as well. Also, the language is incredibly filthy, but not in a fun way like Superbad or Knocked up. It comes across as crass just to be crass and the character portrayed by Dan Fogler is about the most god awful one dimensional piece of crap character ever. Fogler is obnoxious, unfunny and painful. They should have just got Will Ferrell to play it. I am not sure why movies feel the need to include a foul mouthed, clueless fat guy who thinks he knows everything about sex all of the time, but again proving the writing matters it does not work here, like it did in Superbad. I got enough laughs out of the thing to warrant me spending my 90 minutes on the movie, but I didn't pay to see it so maybe I liked it more than I normally would have. Who knows.