Terminally Incoherent

Good Luck Chuck

After watching the previews, you might have expected this movie to be a silly romantic comedy. The plot seems simple - the titular character Chuck (Dean Cook) finds out that he has a peculiar special power. Every girl he sleeps with finds true love in the next guy he dates after him. As a consequence every woman wants to have sex with him, but none of them is interested in a long term relationship. Sounds awesome? Well, not for Chuck who dreams about love, commitment and other gay stuff like that. One day he meets Cam (Jessica Alba), and falls in love. But he is afraid to sleep with her her because of the curse.

Up to this point the story sounds solid, right? You could make a good movie centered around Chuck’s self imposed celibacy, series of misunderstandings, building sexual tension, and show how the characters form a deep emotional bond beyond the physical attraction because of their temporarily asexual relationship. There is lots of room there to throw in situational humor, by having Chuch engineer elaborate cock-blocks on himself to keep the rouse up. This is like a plutinium grade shipper material made out of chocolate and unicorns. Shit like that drives chicks crazy. And with some good writing and delivery it would make a decent story. Wrap it up with some tear-jerking ending that shows how true love overcomes the curse and you have it made. Predictable to a tee, but so is almost every single other romantic comedy out there. But that’s not what happens in the movie. The whole “I can’t have sex with her” thing lasts for about 5 minutes and the story concentrates mostly on the before and after leaving this main plot hook overexposed and then severely underused. Maybe they were trying to avoid being to much like 40 Days and 40 Nights, 40 Year old Virgin and other movies that used this trope? I don’t know.

Here is the caveat: to make a good movie using the above blueprint you have to have to have some good writing and acting talent on your side not to fall into the bottomless pit cliché crappiness. Unfortunately Good Luck Chuck seems to be a bit lacking in both writing and acting departments. Dane Cook might be good at delivering jokes, but he is not a very good dramatic performer. Alba also is not known for great emotional range or breath taking performance. Her talents are more in the visual domain of things. I don’t want to say they are both talentless hacks. They just can’t act… No wait, that’s also too harsh. They probably wouldn’t be able to deliver the level of dramatic performance required for the plot outlined above.

When there is nothing crazy going on on the screen, the normal dialog between characters just falls on its face. Hard. For example, when Chuck and Cam meet for the first time at the wedding they are supposed to have this cute witty back-and-forward conversation. This is done to show the audience that they “click”. Only there is no clicking happening there whatsoever. I don’t know if it’s poor acting, lack of “chemistry” between Cook and Alba or just poor writing. So what we get is awkward, and embarrassingly painful, nausea inducing garbage. This pretty much goes on every time the two are alone with each other.

So to avoid falling into the cliché romance trap and to offset the lack of romantic tension, and subtle character jokes the movie decided to employ… Other cliché elements from slightly different genres of comedy. So you get a wide array of physical humor, slapstick, and crude sexual jokes which the leading pair can deliver if not efficiently then at least competently. To that end, Jessica Alba becomes walking disaster - walking into lamp posts, breaking tables, spilling stuff, falling over and accidentally launching deadly projectiles at people. Interestingly enough, she seems to loose this affliction half way through the movie after her “flawed cuteness” is established.

Then we have a truckload of sexual humor - like the 5 minute montage of Dane Cook having sex with all kinds of different women in various odd sexual positions. There is also grapefruit fucking (hi, 1999 called and they want their American Pie joke back) and sex with morbidly obese women. Oh, and more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a stick at. Not that I’m complaining but when they will edit this movie for network TV, they can just cleanly cut out almost all the scenes with nudity without really loosing any dialog, or plot points. If that is not the definition of gratuitous nudity, I don’t know what is.

And yet, despite the fact that almost every single female in that movie has been shown topless at one point or another, all we get from Jessica Alba is a fleeting side boob glance. Granted, it is a pretty decent side boob shot, as far as side boob shots go. So if you ever wondered what Alba’s breasts look like when she is naked, this movie will give you a pretty good idea. And this scene might be the single redeeming quality of this movie.

Dan Fogler is supposed to be the fat friend with a dirty mind archetype and for the most part he manages to be somewhat amusing. Or at least he tries to be. But to pull that off you need someone to play the “straight man” to the quirky, over-sexed dude. Of course if you want this character type executed flawlessly just look at Jonah Hill with Michael Cera in Superbad. Dane Cook for the most part seems to be unable to assume that role, so a lot of the humor delivered by Dan looses it’s impact due to lack of appropriate reaction shots.

Add all of this together, and you end up with some strange chimera of a movie that is part romantic comedy, part slapstick, part sophomoric sex romp. It tries to borrow from all these genres, but the sum of all parts does not add up into a good movie - just into a haphazard jumble of over the top physical and situational gags connected with stretches of painfully bad acting. Granted, some of these jokes can hold their own, and are actually amusing. But of course most of them have been done better and with more finesse somewhere else.

So, if you want to see a romantic comedy, you’d probably want to skip this movie. If you want to see a movie with a lot of sexual humor, visual gags, and witty, snappy dialog go see Superbad again. If you want to see Jessica Alba’s side boob, Dane Cook fucking like a rabbit, sit through painful “romantic” awkwardness interrupted by over the top sexual gags relying mostly on shock value then this is a movie for you.

My rating: 1.5 stars