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“Good Luck Chuck” attempts to be both romantic and funny and succeeds with neither.
Jessica Alba and Dane Cook try to amuse and enchant us but there is little to be done with such a story as writer Josh Stolberg and director Mark Helfrich cook up.
The movie starts with a group of teenagers playing spin the bottle at a party. When Chuck, Cook’s character, refuses to kiss an intimidating Goth girl, she hexes him.
Years later, Chuck is all grown up and he is a dentist with a curse. This curse however is not one that he sees as a blessing in disguise: apparently, having sex with Chuck guarantees that each woman that goes into his bed will then meet her true love and get married.
And it seems there are just hoards of women wishing they were married. He soon becomes something of an urban legend and has an abundant amount of one-night-stands.
His friend Stu (Dan Fogler), a plastic surgeon obsessed with female mammary glands, apparently exists in the movie only to make the libidinous Chuck seem nicer. The trick doesn’t work, even if Stu is sexist, masturbates to a patient’s mammograms and has Pamela Anderson’s original implants as cherished souvenirs.
Enter Cam Wexler, played by the always-lovely Jessica Alba. Cam is a penguin trainer, nice, sweet, very sexy and very clumsy. Implausibly klutzy. Just how many times can walking into poles, tripping over stuff and hitting herself be funny?
Not even once.
The noble and misunderstood Chuck falls in love with Cam and desperately wants her to stay around as his girlfriend, which is why he repeatedly refuses to have sex with her. He couldn’t bear to have her go to another man.
Considering the movie’s premise, it would have been hard for anyone undertaking this project to make it humorous or tasteful.
But “Chuck” gets no help, not from the crude jokes or the moronic dialogue, not from Cook’s skills as a comedian, and not even from Alba’s sex pot looks. It just makes for a long, boring, offensive 96 minutes.
“Good Luck Chuck” opens Friday, Sept. 21.
Starring: Dane Cook, Jessica Alba, Dan Folger
Director: Mark Helfrich
Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong sexual content including crude dialogue, nudity, language and some drug use
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