In 1985, 10-year-old Charlie Logan is at a party with friends playing Spin the Bottle/7 Minutes in Heaven. When he is paired up with Anisha Carpenter, a goth girl, he rejects her sexual advances, prompting her to place a hex on him:
“You will never be happy! Around you love will fall like rain. You won’t hold it. Your heart will pain! Once the girl has been with you, to the next she will be true!”
While this hex was placed on him when he was 10, he doesn’t find out about it until he’s well into his 20s and attending the wedding of an ex-girlfriend, who, yes, found her husband after she and Charlie broke up. At this wedding, Charlie (Dane Cook) meets Cam (Jessica Alba), a gorgeous and clumsy Zoo employee obsessed with penguins, and the two eventually fall for one another. Will Charlie’s curse mean losing the one woman he’s ever really loved?
I’ve never seen this movie until today. I’m not much of a Dane Cook fan, so I tend to avoid most of his movies. Alas, I’m sick and was too tired to keep scrolling for something, so I settled on Good Luck Chuck. This rom-com is not great. It’s not even good. It has an interesting premise, but rather than do anything remotely interesting with it, Good Luck Chuck relies on gross-out humor, misogyny, and gratuitous nudity.
Cook and Alba don’t have much chemistry, and frankly, Cook isn’t much of an actor. I liked the little kid playing Charlie at age ten, though – that was the only time I found Charlie likable, despite the film attempting to paint him as a nice guy as an adult. He has his moments, but no decent guy would remain friends with someone as crude and vile as Stu (Dan Fogler).
The quirky, clumsy Cam is a caricature of all the similar female leads who have come before her. Stu adds nothing to the movie beyond being a disgusting human being who encourages Charlie’s sexual escapades and makes crass and sexist jokes about women while also being homophobic. Charlie is a bland leading man who shifts seamlessly from “nice guy” to creepy when he thinks he will lose Cam to the next guy who enters her life – his answer to this problem is to smother her with obnoxious attention and gifts.
There is nothing funny or original about Good Luck Chuck. It’s a poorly written, poorly acted 2000s-era rom-com with zero redeemable qualities. Okay, the penguins are adorable as hell, so this movie can have half a star for that.
