Good Luck Chuck (R)
Scott:
Scott: Tonight I am reviewing Good Luck Chuck
. This movie stars Dane Cook as Charlie, a man with a very special gift. This gift is actually a hex put on him by a preteen. The hex states that all women who are ‘with’ him will fall in love not with him, but with the next guy they date. I’m not giving anything away by telling you this because you are told the same thing in the first scene.
Mike could not make this review.
What did I think?
Every so often a movie comes along that makes all other movies you’ve seen better, this is that movie. Just to be clear, I didn’t like it. Where to start?
First, I’m new to the Dane Cook thing. I had never heard of him until he had a special on HBO. The special had some funny stuff, but I wasn’t blown away by it. I don’t know that he’s ready to be a leading man, at least not based on this movie. He was choppy and his jokes either weren’t delivered right, or just weren’t funny. It seemed as if he really wasn’t sure how to play the role.
Dan Fogler as Stu made no sense. I can laugh at anything, vulgar or clean, and I will, if it’s funny, but his stuff was just vulgar. In the beginning the audience laughed at his raunchy language and crude expressions, but towards the end of the movie, the audience lost their taste for him, just as I did. He was over the top, way over the top in what he said and did. He’s a cosmetic surgeon who specializes in fake breasts. There’s one joke in that, and they milked it for fifty. Whenever he was onscreen anything good that they had going was lost. In the end they tried to give him some compassion and that was way too late to be believable.
Jessica Alba, as Cam Wexler, was the only bright light in the movie. That’s not saying she did great in the movie. She just did the best with what she was given. Mostly, she was told to show up and look cute, and for this movie, that was asking a lot. She was supposed to be a really klutzy girl, and in the beginning she was. In first few scenes she ran in to this, or broke that, but then around the middle of the movie she just stopped being a klutz. No reason was given. It seemed like the director forgot that her character was a klutz.
This is director Mark Helfrich’s first movie. I can only hope that it gets better from here. You would think that a person who edited some fun movies like X Men 3, Rush Hour, and Predator would have a good idea of how to direct, but that wasn’t the case. The movie was back and forth between raunchy and sweet and felt much longer than the 1:36 runtime.
What do I rate this?
The movie was just obnoxious. It wanted to be grosser than other movies, have more sex and nudity than other movies, but it should have tried to be better than other movies. I give it a 1 overall and a 1 for comedy.
