Good Luck Chuck(2007)- User Reviews

Well, this movie is terrible, but I can't say it's uninteresting.

GOOD LUCK CHUCK (Mark Helfrich, 2007) is about a guy (Chuck, natch, played by Dane Cook) who was cursed as a child to never find love, and instead, be the catalyst to others finding it. In other words, if a woman sleeps with him, she will meet her future husband almost immediately afterward, but Chuck himself will never find the right girl. Unfortunately, he meets Cam (Jessica Alba), a klutz who, well, looks like Jessica Alba, infatuating him immediately. Will Chuck be able to get his chick? That's the film.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't fully answer that question, or at least, never answers how. But that's not really a surprise, because this movie is so badly written, besides some good lines here and there, that your expectations get low about fifteen minutes in. The central problem with it is that it has two plots, either of which could have stood alone and been a better film. The first, a Romantic comedy about a guy trying to woo a disaster-prone girl who's emotionally unavailable (for reasons never really explained) would have been a good movie, better still if it was told from her perspective. So would the second film possibility, a wacky sex comedy about a guy who finds happiness for everybody else except himself and decides to indulge in that. Instead, we have this awkward combination where Chuck decides he's doing a good deed by screwing a bunch of girls he doesn't love, preventing Cam from wanting to get with him, but then she changes her mind for some reason, even though he's now a well-known sleaze, only they can't get together because of his "powers" which everybody kind of believes in, but not really. The sequence of events and shifts in tone from sweet to raunchy can drive you nuts. And the movie is pretty misogynistic, which is weird since they show it on Oxygen or WE or something, one of those women's networks. It's just a big mess.

So why is it interesting, besides the obvious, morbid curiosity? I watched this movie because I realize that I've never actually sat down and watched one of Jessica Alba's movies after having had such a bad experience on "Dark Angel". And reputation aside, she's okay. Not a bad actress, and has never had a role I could use to gauge whether or not she's a good actress, so I have to admit she holds her own here. Anna Faris would have been better in this comedic role, but Alba is funny enough. With better material, I'm sure she would have done fine. And so would Dane Cook. This film probably killed his future chances at stardom, but it's not really his fault, as this movie has a lot of problems that have nothing to do with him or Alba. You can't really blame the leads. I wouldn't mind seeing Cook in something with a better script.

But that's not what we have here. Instead, we have a movie that fails on multiple fronts. The music is as bad as the music in THE TAO OF STEVE (Jenniphr Goodman, 2000), and the whole thing looks low budget and / or Canadian, despite having two A list talents (well, Dane Cook is probably B now, but back then he was up and coming). The story is convoluted and inappropriate at times (in spite of having some good lines, strangely enough), and the resolution of the plot makes no sense. As I said, this is the screenwriter's only film, and the director hasn't done much since either, with good reason. This movie never really had a chance. D.