‘Good Luck Chuck’ Doesn’t Quite Make It
“Good Luck Chuck” looked like such a funny movie with alot of potential when you watch the trailer. But than trailers are deceiving. In “Good Luck Chuck,” Jessica Alba resumes her fearless quest to make someone, somewhere, laugh. For this occasion, she plays a sweet dingbat being pursued by Dane Cook. That he wants her at all testifies to Alba’s appeal as a cover girl, not her prowess as a comedian.
This obnoxious, ugly-looking movie isn’t even about her. It’s about how sex with Cook guarantees certain women (chesty, blonde, dim) that the next man they meet will be Mr. Right. Cook’s character, a dentist named Chuck, doesn’t want this curse. All he wants is Alba. And like most movies in which Alba appears, this one can’t wait to strip her down to her panties. This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy. The filmmakers think the best way to make Alba accessibly human is to humiliate her. So Cam, the penguin trainer she plays, is a klutz. If she can walk into a pole or bang her face on the foot of an ice slide, she does. This is excruciating and exasperatingly unfunny, like standing under a piñata that yields no treats regardless of how many times you beat it.
In her defense, no one with breasts in this movie is funny, not even Chuck’s fat, horny best friend, Stu (Dan Fogler), although we’re supposed to find him a riot. Stu is a doctor who keeps Pamela Anderson’s original implants in a case in his office(can anyone say gross!). And he berates Chuck for finding one-night-stands with dozens of women a chore. The character exists in part to make Chuck seem virtuous. So when Chuck lies beneath his desperate assistant, a big, bossy black woman, it’s played as an act of cringe-inducing charity. What? Stereotypes need love, too.
Cook works hard to be funny and stay likable. But respectability doesn’t suit him. Either that or movies don’t. He hasn’t yet found a way to get laughs out of being a nice guy in a romantic comedy. Then again, if you’ve found yourself in a movie that permits you to make out with Jessica Alba over and over, I imagine being funny, smart, or entertaining is probably the last thing on your mind. ”Good Luck Chuck” doubles as an excuse for its makers to come to work and gawk at topless chicks. In that respect, the filmmaking and the the breasts have something in common: They’re fake.