I would say that
Good Luck Chuck is a movie that has its mind in the gutter, but that would require the movie to have a mind, which it does not. It also doesn't have any laughs. What it does have is a lot of actors forced to recite uncomfortable and juvenile dialogue that I would not wish upon any actor, a woman with three breasts, characters who get off on watching sexual acts performed on stuffed animals, and a morbidly obese woman whose entire body is filled with pus-filled pimples. It boggles my mind that screenwriter Josh Stolberg can put all of this into a screenplay, yet couldn't think of a single amusing thing to go with them. Maybe it's because these kind of ideas aren't funny to begin with. This is the kind of movie you try your hardest to forget after you've seen it.
When Charlie "Chuck" Logan (Dane Cook) was 10-years-old, he was at a birthday party playing Spin the Bottle. When it was his turn to spin, it pointed at the freaky goth girl who he didn't want anything to do with. To punish him for resisting her advances, the girl placed a curse on Charlie that day that he will never find true love, and that each girl he falls in love with will only find true love with the next man they date after him. In the present day, Charlie is a dentist, even though we only see him doing dental work once in the entire movie. The rest of the time, he's hanging out with his perverted best friend Stu (Dan Fogler from
Balls of Fury), who works as a plastic surgeon that specializes in breast enhancements. Somehow, the word of Charlie's curse has spread onto the Internet, and now women are flooding his dental practice and banging down his door for him to have sex with them, so that they can find true love with the next man they meet. Stu thinks Charlie's got it made, since he has a free ticket to endless non-committal sex with any woman he chooses. Charlie, on the other hand, is not so sure it's a blessing, especially when he meets the very cute and highly accident prone woman who works at the penguin habitat in the zoo nearby. Her name is Cam (Jessica Alba), and she's not sure she should fall for Charlie, since she thinks the whole curse story is a hoax to get free sex from women. She eventually does warm up to him, and now Charlie is desperate to find a way to break the curse so that he can spend the rest of his life with her.
Good Luck Chuck wants to be an adult sex comedy, but it is too juvenile and moronic to appeal to anyone with the IQ of an adult. That right there is the problem. Who is this movie intended for? My guess is that it's for people who are about as smart as the characters in this movie. Unfortunately, these are some of the dumbest people to ever walk into a romantic comedy. Charlie and Cam are stupid for even wanting to be together in the first place. I said earlier that Cam is highly accident prone. The movie pushes this statement to the limit by having Cam accidentally burn Charlie with hot liquid during their first encounter, then go on to send multiple sharp objects flying into his back and later electrocute him during their second meeting. This would send most men running for the hills, even if the woman did have the body of Jessica Alba. And yet, Charlie becomes completely infatuated with her. So infatuated does Charlie become that he literally starts stalking her. Here is where the movie goes so off course it's not even on the same page with any sane viewer. During the entire middle section of the movie, Charlie goes from being a fairly reasonable guy, to a guy who follows Cam around obsessively, beats up anyone who tries to talk to her, and develops a disturbing laugh that sounds like he just escaped from a mental hospital. The movie seems to completely forget that these are the people we're supposed to want to see get together at the end. All I wanted to see was Charlie placed behind bars, and Cam be put in isolation so that she would no longer be a hazzard to herself and others.
There is no logic behind anything that happens in this movie. There is no reason for Charlie and Cam to be in love with each other, just like there's no reason for Cam to forgive Charlie for turning into a literal raving psychopath around her. But, she does anyway. The movie would probably like us to believe that she is forgiving and Charlie has learned his lesson about giving her space. I'm not buying it, though. These characters don't deserve to be happy. Then again, neither does anyone else who surrounds them. Charlie's best friend, Stu, is a guy who likes to save the substance that female celebrities have removed from their breasts during breast reduction surgery. After seeing how this guy pleasures himself to various kinds of fruits and produce, I am grateful the filmmakers forgot to show what he does with the stuff he holds onto. There is also a sequence where Charlie forces himself to have sex with an obnoxious, grossly obese woman in order to test his curse theory. Not only do we get to see them making love, but the camera fixates on the woman's backside which is covered with bloody zits, scabs, and other abnormalities. Why would anyone want to make a movie like this? This is a movie that hates men, women, sex, and love. It exists only to disgust, and doesn't want to do anything but. Crude humor can work, but there has to be a build up. This is the kind of movie where people wallow around in filth for no reason, and expects us to be amused by it.
The saddest thing about
Good Luck Chuck is that there is some talent on display when you start to strip away the layers of junk. Jessica Alba does have a very sweet and winning personality when the movie isn't forcing her to act like a reject from a
Three Stooges short. She's actually the closest thing this movie has to a decent person, which further enhances my theory that she would be better off without Charlie. She's a frustrating character ultimately, because just when we're starting to like her, the movie forces her to do something completely stupid and out of character. The same could be said for Charlie as well. During the first half of the film, Dane Cook is surprisingly subdued and almost charming. But then the middle section comes, and Cook suddenly starts hamming the role up to the point that he doesn't even resemble the same person anymore. The fact that Charlie comes across as a sane individual for the first 45 minutes or so makes it all the more hard to swallow that he would possibly think turning psychotic and frightening Cam would be a good way to hold onto her. These characters are at the mercy of a screenplay that keeps on turning to stupidity and ugliness for laughs. Equally disappointing is Dan Fogler, who managed to win me over in
Balls of Fury, but here is stuck with such a shallow and disgusting character that he couldn't generate even a smile from me.
There's not one single second of
Good Luck Chuck that I believed. Not one single instant that seemed remotely plausible. Sometimes I can live with that, but this movie just makes one too many wrong turns for me to suspend disbelief. The film is being advertised as a date comedy, but only very deranged individuals will find anything within its running time romantic. This is the kind of movie where you wince when it comes to a happy ending, because it hasn't earned it. But then, this movie's idea of a happy ending is having two people's tongues get frozen together while kissing. Normally, I would be surprised. With
Good Luck Chuck, I wasn't.
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I would say that Good Luck Chuck is a movie that has its mind in the gutter, but that would require the movie to have a mind, which it does not. It also doesn't have any laughs. What it does have is a lot of actors forced to recite uncomfortable and juvenile dialogue that I would not wish upon any actor, a woman with three breasts, characters who get off on watching sexual acts performed on stuffed animals, and a morbidly obese woman whose entire body is filled with pus-filled pimples. It boggles my mind that screenwriter Josh Stolberg can put all of this into a screenplay, yet couldn't think of a single amusing thing to go with them. Maybe it's because these kind of ideas aren't funny to begin with. This is the kind of movie you try your hardest to forget after you've seen it.
When Charlie "Chuck" Logan (Dane Cook) was 10-years-old, he was at a birthday party playing Spin the Bottle. When it was his turn to spin, it pointed at the freaky goth girl who he didn't want anything to do with. To punish him for resisting her advances, the girl placed a curse on Charlie that day that he will never find true love, and that each girl he falls in love with will only find true love with the next man they date after him. In the present day, Charlie is a dentist, even though we only see him doing dental work once in the entire movie. The rest of the time, he's hanging out with his perverted best friend Stu (Dan Fogler from Balls of Fury), who works as a plastic surgeon that specializes in breast enhancements. Somehow, the word of Charlie's curse has spread onto the Internet, and now women are flooding his dental practice and banging down his door for him to have sex with them, so that they can find true love with the next man they meet. Stu thinks Charlie's got it made, since he has a free ticket to endless non-committal sex with any woman he chooses. Charlie, on the other hand, is not so sure it's a blessing, especially when he meets the very cute and highly accident prone woman who works at the penguin habitat in the zoo nearby. Her name is Cam (Jessica Alba), and she's not sure she should fall for Charlie, since she thinks the whole curse story is a hoax to get free sex from women. She eventually does warm up to him, and now Charlie is desperate to find a way to break the curse so that he can spend the rest of his life with her.
Good Luck Chuck wants to be an adult sex comedy, but it is too juvenile and moronic to appeal to anyone with the IQ of an adult. That right there is the problem. Who is this movie intended for? My guess is that it's for people who are about as smart as the characters in this movie. Unfortunately, these are some of the dumbest people to ever walk into a romantic comedy. Charlie and Cam are stupid for even wanting to be together in the first place. I said earlier that Cam is highly accident prone. The movie pushes this statement to the limit by having Cam accidentally burn Charlie with hot liquid during their first encounter, then go on to send multiple sharp objects flying into his back and later electrocute him during their second meeting. This would send most men running for the hills, even if the woman did have the body of Jessica Alba. And yet, Charlie becomes completely infatuated with her. So infatuated does Charlie become that he literally starts stalking her. Here is where the movie goes so off course it's not even on the same page with any sane viewer. During the entire middle section of the movie, Charlie goes from being a fairly reasonable guy, to a guy who follows Cam around obsessively, beats up anyone who tries to talk to her, and develops a disturbing laugh that sounds like he just escaped from a mental hospital. The movie seems to completely forget that these are the people we're supposed to want to see get together at the end. All I wanted to see was Charlie placed behind bars, and Cam be put in isolation so that she would no longer be a hazzard to herself and others.
There is no logic behind anything that happens in this movie. There is no reason for Charlie and Cam to be in love with each other, just like there's no reason for Cam to forgive Charlie for turning into a literal raving psychopath around her. But, she does anyway. The movie would probably like us to believe that she is forgiving and Charlie has learned his lesson about giving her space. I'm not buying it, though. These characters don't deserve to be happy. Then again, neither does anyone else who surrounds them. Charlie's best friend, Stu, is a guy who likes to save the substance that female celebrities have removed from their breasts during breast reduction surgery. After seeing how this guy pleasures himself to various kinds of fruits and produce, I am grateful the filmmakers forgot to show what he does with the stuff he holds onto. There is also a sequence where Charlie forces himself to have sex with an obnoxious, grossly obese woman in order to test his curse theory. Not only do we get to see them making love, but the camera fixates on the woman's backside which is covered with bloody zits, scabs, and other abnormalities. Why would anyone want to make a movie like this? This is a movie that hates men, women, sex, and love. It exists only to disgust, and doesn't want to do anything but. Crude humor can work, but there has to be a build up. This is the kind of movie where people wallow around in filth for no reason, and expects us to be amused by it.
The saddest thing about Good Luck Chuck is that there is some talent on display when you start to strip away the layers of junk. Jessica Alba does have a very sweet and winning personality when the movie isn't forcing her to act like a reject from a Three Stooges short. She's actually the closest thing this movie has to a decent person, which further enhances my theory that she would be better off without Charlie. She's a frustrating character ultimately, because just when we're starting to like her, the movie forces her to do something completely stupid and out of character. The same could be said for Charlie as well. During the first half of the film, Dane Cook is surprisingly subdued and almost charming. But then the middle section comes, and Cook suddenly starts hamming the role up to the point that he doesn't even resemble the same person anymore. The fact that Charlie comes across as a sane individual for the first 45 minutes or so makes it all the more hard to swallow that he would possibly think turning psychotic and frightening Cam would be a good way to hold onto her. These characters are at the mercy of a screenplay that keeps on turning to stupidity and ugliness for laughs. Equally disappointing is Dan Fogler, who managed to win me over in Balls of Fury, but here is stuck with such a shallow and disgusting character that he couldn't generate even a smile from me.
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