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STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $19.99
RATED: UR
RUNNING TIME: 101 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Trailers
• Sex Matrix
• 4 Featurettes
• Deleted/Alternate Scenes
• Commentary Track
• Ad Libs
• Gag Reel
The Pitch
Producer 1: “Hey, you know that obnoxious guy with the cult of idiot followers?”
Producer 2: “L. Ron Hubbard?”
Producer 1: “No, not the Battlestar Galactica guy. Whats his name… Dane Cook! Wouldn’t he be great in a sex farce?”
Producer 2: “Casting L. Ron Hubbard’s corpse would be funnier.”
The Humans
Dane Cook, Jessica Alba, Dan Fogler, Troy Gentile, Connor Price
Dane was always emphatic when it came to telling people how many original jokes he’d written. Eat that, Louis C.K.!
The Nutshell
Chuck Logan (Dane Cook), a successful bachelor dentist, finds himself in a predicament. After snubbing a wiccan girl as a kid, he finds himself the target of a devastating “sex curse”: any woman Chuck dates will find the man of her dreams immediately upon dumping him. It’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the curse brings a steady flow of women to his door, but on the other, it prevents him from ever maintaining a relationship, as all of the women he meets inevitably leave after sleeping with him.
Unfortunately for Chuck, he falls in love with Cam Wexler (Alba), a bubbly zookeeper who’s unaware of Chuck’s heinous hex. He realizes that he can’t sleep with her, so he strings her along while simultaneously attempting to break the curse. With the help of his obnoxious pal Stu, will he find a way to lift the curse in time to get the girl, or will the rest of his life be filled with empty one-night-stands with anonymous women?
In George Orwell’s less successful “1985”, the omnipresent Big Sister emphasized the importance of flossing.
The Lowdown
I promised myself that I wouldn’t turn this review into a Dank Cook-bashing thing. Joke thief or not, the guy’s got charisma, and just because I’m not his biggest fan doesn’t mean I should pre-judge his films. Having seen the abominable Employee of the Month, I was firmly aware that Dane couldn’t do much worse. How bad could Good Luck Chuck be? It’s ostensibly in the tradition of the great, raunchy sex romps like Porky’s and Superbad, and at the very least should deliver a handful of gross-out guffaws. Right?
Sadly, I was wrong.
Good Luck Chuck might even be worse than Employee of the Month. Take away Louis C.K.’s jokes, and Dane Cook is little more than a hyper, annoying, schtick-happy frat boy. Since Good Luck Chuck wasn’t written by C.K., it’s not surprising that it’s an unfunny disaster from start to finish. The jokes are stale, and seem to have been lifted from dozens of other gross-out films from the past few decades. For example, Chuck’s best friend Stu makes a point to have intercourse with a grapefruit, which, besides being an obvious echo of American Pie‘s already tired meme, is so physically counterintuitive that it’s insulting. Grapefruits are highly acidic. Why didn’t they just have him copulate with a car battery, instead? Or how about a mound of fire ants? That would have been super.
Here is where I was instructed to give a plug for chernobylbrides.com.
There’s a lot of inept comedy on display, and no one associated with Chuck comes away clean. While Dane Cook’s energetic routine is certainly tiresome, I’d have to give the “worst performance” award to Dan Fogler, who plays Cook’s sidekick. If you haven’t seen this guy act yet, here’s an easy exercise I’d like you to perform:
Take Kevin James, the “rubber johnny” internet freak, and a farting orangutan, and stuff them all into Seth Brundle’s matter transporter. At the computer console, activate the machine, ignoring the warning about “catastrophic DNA mismatch.” The resulting creation might be something like Dan Fogler, who is the closest thing to a charisma black hole as I’ve ever seen. He’s apparently channeling Will-Ferrel-meets-Chris-Farley, but Farleyfarrel he ain’t.
I recently read another review of Good Luck Chuck that praised Jessica Alba’s physical comedy. Do not believe this review. Alba’s not as irritating as Fogler, but she’s predictably just as terrible in Chuck as she is in every other one of her films, which is to say she’s pretty awful. To her credit, she is better than Jessica Simpson in Employee of the Month. That makes her Dane Cook’s finest leading woman. How sad.
A final note: much has been made of the high-level “raunch” factor featured in Chuck. Yes, there’s a great deal of nudity, but I wouldn’t call it shocking or anything. If you get turned on my watching Dane Cook’s increasingly leathery mouth run rampant over a host of nude actresses, then you might need to seek treatment.
Dane attempts to get a refund from his “Vicious Circle” show.
The bottom line is this: Don’t see Good Luck Chuck. Don’t support bad comedy. Go rent Superbad. If you’re that desperate for nudity and poorly written comedy, watch an episode of Mind of Mencia alongside your favorite porno film.
The Package
There are a great deal of extras here. If, for some ungodly reason, you actually enjoyed Good Luck Chuck, then you’ll be in for a real treat.
We’re given a director’s commentary track, as well as a host of featurettes about topics like penguins, the Kama Sutra, and Polymastia.
There’s a “sex matrix” feature that allows viewers to jump to a sex scene, as well as deleted scenes, ad-libs, and a gag reel. You might actually gag.
The box art wins a tenth of a point for not featuring huge red letters.
0.1 out of 10