Good Luck Chuck has plenty of sex and raunchiness, but it's light on the comedy.
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Maybe Jessica Alba is a better actress than I thought she was. Previously, she seemed so stiff and self-conscious that it reminded me of a beginning dancer trying to silently count the steps, instead of just going with the flow. But maybe romantic comedies are her thing. If you're listening, Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, or Nancy Meyers, how about casting her in an intelligent one, so we can tell for sure?
Alba might enjoy being around a set where creativity, not puerile raunchiness, is the pervading atmosphere. On one of the bonus features, the actress says that after her part was done she just got out of there, because they were "basically shooting a porno." On another featurette, director Mark Helfrich admits that they often had to shoot four different women in a row doing nude or semi-nude sex scenes with star Dane Cook, "so it was like a gang-bang for Dane."
If you're thinking, sweet, then you might actually enjoy this crude male fantasy. In that case, what's sweeter still is that there's even a bonus feature for horn-dogs called "Sex Matrix," which shows a "Hollywood Squares"-style grid of sex scenes from the movie. Click on any one of them and you get the clip. No dumb plot to wade through, and no fast-forwarding to get to the good stuff. Just BAM! and you're there.
That feature pretty much indicates who the audience is for a film like this, and the Blu-ray features the unrated cut. Though Alba's character is as clutzy as Cameron Diaz's in "There's Something About Mary," there's no comparing the two films. What Helfrich and writer Josh Stolberg give us is something far more adolescent and tonally schizoid. One minute it's as sweet as "50 First Dates" (even bordering on the Saccharine) and the next minute we're watching a severely overweight woman in a bikini (not CGI, by the way) lean over and fart, or we're hearing how Chuck's best buddy, a still-adolescent plastic surgeon who specializes in breasts, cores out a hole in a grapefruit and uses it to masturbate. Okay, you might be thinking, but what about that jizz in Mary's hair? Isn't that even grosser? Yeah, but the gross-outs in an otherwise intelligent comedy are fewer and farther between. Plus, when most of the lines and the concept seem intelligent, you can get away with more. With a lesser screenplay, it just seems . . . gross. What's worse than a 300-pound woman farting? How about dating that woman and watching her eat as if she were hovering over a trough, or getting a close-up of her mustache and moles with hair sticking out? Or the penultimate gross-out, having to watch her mount poor Chuck (Cook), which was apparently the one negative he had in an otherwise slam bam thank-you ma'am role.
This film had "legs," as all sex comedies do, so you've probably already either seen it or heard about it. But as loony as the concept seems, it turns out that it was inspired by a real person--a guy named Steve Glenn. Glenn had seven relationships go south, and within three months after the break-up, five of those women got engaged. People saw a pattern, and while we don't know if he actually had the same experience as Chuck does in this film--word getting out and women lining up to have sex with him so they can meet Mr. Right--it's as Alba notes, even if you don't want to admit it: "every guy's fantasy to have sex with as many women as possible." There's a closet universality to it all that you'd think would have made for an engaging comedy, but "Good Luck Chuck" flies so under the radar that the wheels keep dragging in the muck. If the filmmakers had opted for less rauchiness and sex, instead giving viewers adult situations and complications, it would have been far more successful.
It's also a bit difficult to swallow that Cook is the exception to the guy rule: a nice guy, rather than the kind of sex-obsessed, say-anything-to-get-laid gnome of a plastic surgeon who's been his best friend since childhood. If Cook were really nice, would he really rationalize in his head that he's a regular Mother Theresa ministering to the ailing and sleep with more women than a dozen men can bed in a lifetime? He just flat-out enjoys it too much (with the exception of the 300-pound woman and his overweight secretary). And his friend, Stu (Dan Fogler)? I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully tired of the fat-and-horny sidekick who keeps chattering nonstop.
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[release]22503[/release]