Movie review: 'Good Luck Chuck'

1 star (out of four)

Drink all the Three-Buck Chuck you want (any excuse to have your designated driver stop off at Trader Joe’s), but it won’t make “Good Luck Chuck” go down any easier. The film is some sort of humor-deprivation experiment. For vulgarity spiced with wit and crassness done right, see “Superbad” or “Knocked Up.” For a reminder that stridency gets you nowhere without certain other ingredients, “Good Luck Chuck” is this year’s low-ender to beat.

In stand-up mode, Dane Cook rides a wave of adorable hostility; “Good Luck Chuck” packages him as more of a generic rom-com headliner. He plays Charlie, an affable and affluent dentist who horndogs around some but who cannot teach his heart how to luv. (Men!) The conceit of Josh Stolberg’s script is simple: Every woman Charlie dates ends up marrying the next guy. His reputation as a marital good-luck charm ensured the ladies beat a path to his door. The resulting one-night-stand montage runs 10 times longer, and more witlessly, than the comparable sequence in “Wedding Crashers.”

 Early on, Charlie falls for the penguin-loving employee (Jessica Alba) of a SeaWorld-type theme park. If they get together will Ms. Nice automatically move on to Mr. Right? Heckling Charlie from the sidelines is his lifelong pal Stu (Dan Fogler), a cosmetic surgeon who ends up married to a woman with three breasts. (Stop, you’re killing me.) In “Superbad,” the all-theory, no-practice lech played by Jonah Hill had a way with words, no matter how nasty or outlandish. By contrast, in “Good Luck Chuck” Stu, a similar character type, is somewhat more eerie than the filmmakers intended, an ogling bore who masturbates with grapefruits. I mean it; stop, you’re killing me.

Alba takes a few noisy pratfalls when they’re not taken by her stunt double, but director Mark Helfrich, a feature film newbie, slams the slapstick so hard in terms of technique it’s as if he were back working on one of the “Rush Hour” films. (He was an editor on all three.) Without any directorial guidance Alba, like Fogler and Cook, cannot transcend her material, let alone deliver a line such as “I may go to Antarctica for research!” without having it sound like “Check out these shoes I got at the mall!” All this, plus more condescending fat-broad gags than “Norbit.” “Good Luck Chuck” wants us rooting for Charlie and Cam, but that would require a rooting interest. With this script, roto-rooting’s more like it.

mjphillips@tribune.com