Good Luck Chuck is Truly Good for a Laugh

Starring Dane Cook (Waiting) and Jessica Alba (The Fantastic Four), Good Luck Chuck is great, raunchy fun for anyone 18 and up. Many may consider it stupid, but they're not seeing what I saw.

What's Good Luck Chuck about?

In the mid-80s Charlie was a boy like any other boy. He had a friend - a rather obnoxious friend at that. He went to birthday parties. He and other kids would play spin the bottle. The kids would all take whomever the spinning bottle stopped on into a closet. One birthday party, Charlie ended up spinning the bottle and landing the one girl he had never expected or wanted. It was a girl dressed all in black with goth makeup, and a very terrifying demeanor. The girl almost jumps his bones when they get in the closet. He gets scared and rejects her. They both pretty much come crashing out of the closet together. She puts a curse or hex on Charlie, that he will never find happiness.

Now after so many years, Charlie (Cook) may actually be serious about settling down. He goes through girlfriends left and right. There's really nothing too obvious about his bad luck to relate back to that curse. Anyone might just think that they haven't met the right girl yet. Then as fate would have it, when all of Chuck's former girlfriends or flings had left him, they had found and married their true love. The possibility of meeting Mr. Right or Mrs. Right gets a lot of women - and even a couple of men intrigued with the idea of sleeping with Chuck.

Charlie is a good guy. He has a very primative but ultimately funny sidekick for a best friend who thinks that "sex is still sex." So you might say, Chuck is influenced by the wrong people to be shallow and have a little fun with this curse. Unfortunately again, the curse isn't about Chuck never being able to keep a steady relationship, it's about him being happy. When the girls stop losing interest in Chuck as a person and start using him for a vibrator, it starts making Charlie miserable.

Then Charlie finds this woman, this unbelievably clumsy penguin expert of a girl and falls in love without ever having sex with her. The girl, Cam Wexler (Alba) turns him down a couple of times before finally agreeing to go out with him. She's vivacious. She's a modern woman. She's gorgeous. It is Jessica Alba, after all. But it is from here on in that the film feels like it's actually got a voice of its own. It's not a stereotypical, post-Adam Sandler comedy. It's fun to watch Chuck keep from losing his girl by avoiding doing the deed and make a complete idiot of himself in the process.

My thoughts

Obviously, Good Luck Chuck is no masterpiece. It's not even going to be a thought in the minds of anyone at the Raspberry Awards - and its all the better for it. It's funny. I was laughing. A lot of the people in the audience were laughing. The jokes were timed well. The performances were great. I was actually worried that they let Alba do a few of her own stunts, the clumsy, slapstick moments were thought through so well. The story is unique and inventive. There were parts that just didn't feel like they worked but the next joke made up for anything negative in between.

Final note

See Good Luck Chuck for a laugh-out-riot of a good time. This is an impressive moviegoing experience in a year full of disappointments. It's not the best, but it will get the job done.