It’s not like one goes into a film like GOOD LUCK CHUCK with great expectations. And so it is all the more remarkable, dispiriting rather, when even a low bar, a very lowered bar, isn’t met. This flick isn’t just bad, it falls into that rare category of works that are actual harbingers of the end of civilization as we know it. No humor beyond salacious references, no cleverness that rises above the fart joke, and nothing original in its entire 96 minutes beyond a premise that is wasted here.
That would be the plight of the eponymous Chuck (Dane Cook). As a 10-year-old he was hexed during a very bad game of spin-the-bottle and as a result, all the women he’s with in the biblical sense marry the very next man that they start dating. And they always start dating someone else because while Chuck is more than willing to do the nasty, he is never willing to say “I love you.” Somehow, in one of the scripts legion of weaknesses, Chuck has made it into his early 30s without noticing this, though he is invited to all the weddings, even getting special toasts from the bride thanking him for being her lucky charm. In another of those weaknesses, pretty much every desperate woman in Los Angeles suddenly shows up at Chuck’s dental practice in hopes of scoring with him and then marrying someone else. Naturally, this is also when Chuck finally falls for someone, a penguin specialist named Cam (Jessical Alba), who is as dangerous as she is beautiful, thanks to a monumental case of klutziness.
Alba performs with all the giddiness of a seventh-grader trying out, badly, for the school play. Cook does a credible job of faking sincerity without ever quite managing to pull it off. And Dan Fogler, as Chuck’s mammary-obsessed best pal looks dazed in a slightly pop-eyed way as he delivers lines that are aimed at the smirky-snicker reflex and debases himself with a grapefruit. In fact, the funniest moment in the entire film comes when Lonny Ross as Cam’s stoner brother, bites into a sandwich while looking on in hazy disbelief at the goings on. The rest is an execrable exercise highlighted by Cook demonstrating several pages of the Kama Sutra and making is look considerably less sensual than sirloin going through a meat grinder.
I spent a great deal of time pondering which was worse, Dane Cook’s pineapple dance, or Dane Cook’s penguin song. I needn’t have bothered. They were just the warm up for the real low point. The end credits play over Cook doing things with a stuffed penguin that will ruin forever their playful innocence for anyone who sees it. And that is the legacy and the lesson of GOOD LUCK CHUCK. Just when you think things can’t possibly get worse, they do. And then some.
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