Unlucky Charm
posted on Wednesday, February 06, 2008 in Movie Reviews
Comedies don’t need to be cinematic masterpieces to be successful. All they really need to be is funny. It’s so much easier to forgive a comedy for its faults if it just manages to make us laugh a couple of times in the theater. Unfortunately, Good Luck Chuck isn’t able to hide its faults through its comedy. It just isn’t very funny. After playing spin the bottle with a goth girl as a kid, Charlie gets a hex placed on him. He’s cursed to never find love, while love falls like rain all around him. As an adult, it translates to this: after he sleeps with a girl, that girl is going to find the love of her life in the next guy she meets. Charlie doesn’t believe the curse, but after some prodding from his best friend, he decides to take advantage of the situation by sleeping with women desperate to get married. When he meets the girl of his dreams, however, everything changes, and Charlie tries to find a way to avert the curse.
It’s actually kind of hard to describe what’s wrong with this film, since there are really too many things to list. Virtually every aspect of this film is flawed in some way. The script is utter rubbish from start to finish, filled to the brim with bad jokes, weird structure problems, and some of the dumbest characters ever written. You know that a script’s in trouble when it mentions that penguins eat their own poo more than twice.
But really, the main problem with this film is that it just isn’t funny. It tries really hard, cribbing jokes and situations from a humongous pool of previously successful comedies, but they just fail to make any of it work. It fails as a sex-romp. It fails as a gross-out comedy. It fails as a slapstick comedy. It fails to be a romantic comedy. It just fails as a comedy, period.
The secret to comedy, as any comedian will tell you, is timing. This film doesn’t have any. The filmmakers pace the jokes so poorly and film it so badly that almost everything falls flat. Even easy jokes don’t come out funny. Seeing Jessica Alba crash into a lamp post is hilarious in theory. In this film, even the simple pleasure of seeing Jessica Alba hurt herself comes off lame, and actually kind of horrible.
And Dane Cook is not funny. He just isn’t. That’s a problem for this film as well, since he’s in almost every scene. His manic energy just doesn’t translate well on screen. On stage, he can get away with just being as loud and as crazy as he wants to be, but on screen, it mostly reveals his deficiencies as an actor and a comedian. He’s just annoying. Dan Fogler, who’s usually a sure bet for comedy, is pretty terrible in this film as well. Jessica Alba is perhaps the best thing about this film, which is really kind of sad, since she can’t act, and she doesn’t have any comedic chops.
To sum up: Good Luck Chuck is a really bad film. It’s poorly made, and it just isn’t funny. I wish I could give Good Luck Chuck a rating lower than one star. Negative twelve would be a lot closer to what I feel this film deserves.
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