Good Luck Chuck is like any crotch-related affliction -- it's only funny when someone else is suffering through it.
So like those herpes-themed TV ads aimed at souls with ailing groins, let me say that I have seen this hump-obsessed raunch-com, but you haven't. And, hopefully, you'll be working to keep it that way.
In the case of Chuck, the painfully-affixed protuberance is none other than Dane Cook. He stars as Charlie, an affable dentist who realizes every woman he sleeps with immediately moves on from him to her soulmate. (He was hexed by a Goth girl he rejected in 1985.)
Word eventually spreads about Charlie's "curse" and he immediately becomes a magnet for beautiful (and not so beautiful) women desperately seeking true love. And to find it, all they have to do is sleep with him. A dream come true? Turns out the frat-boy wish fulfilment fantasy only satisfies Charlie for so long -- especially when he falls for Cam Wexler (Jessica Alba), a clumsy, gorgeous penguin handler.
Charlie's dilemma, though, is clear. If he sleeps with her, does that mean she will then ditch him for the man of her dreams? And if a tree falls in the forest, can it crush me during the preview screening and spare me another miserable minute of this bottom-dwelling tripe?
As I'm sitting here type-type-typing away on my keyboard, I would guess the answer to the latter is no. As for the former, that's a question best left puzzled over by philosophers, or at least soon-to-be-unemployable screenwriters who fill the mid-section of the movie with Charlie improbably ducking Alba's sexual advances.
The rest of Chuck is essentially a) aren't-we-oh-so-dirty dialogue, mostly perpetrated by Dan Fogler in the kind of grating performance for which career tombstones are reserved, and b) sex-themed antics that offend only because they generate so little laughter. Naturally, too, there are penguins and pratfalls. And no, never have penguins looked so dignified or gifted as in this particular company.
The charisma-free Cook, if you don't know him, is yet one more example of how anyone -- from my lazy-eyed cousin Frank and his garage band, The Optics, to three-legged pets -- can achieve the low-end of fame in our MySpace/YouTube/Facebook age. Presumably, someone thought Cook had the chops to carry a screen larger than 17 inches; apparently they'd never seen him in last year's abysmal Employee of the Month. But then, so few people did.
Fortunately like most unfortunate conditions, Cook's blink-and-you-missed-it-fame is curable.
The solution? Audience abstinence. Expect treatment to commence immediately.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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