Good Luck Chuck
(R)

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This new comedy that splices Dane Cook with Jessica Alba is what happens when an R-rated sex comedy isn't written, directed or produced by Judd Apatow, who gave us Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Superbad. Good Luck Chuck features Cook as Charlie, a successful dentist who becomes a sexual magnet after word gets out that any woman who sleeps with him once meets the man of her dreams next and marries him instead. Along comes Charlie's dream woman -- gorgeous, accident-prone, relationship-phobic Cam Wexler (Alba), who works with penguins at a marine adventure park -- so he must break the curse or lose out forever. End of premise, which is pretty much an excuse for a series of loose riffs involving Cook getting his freak on with an assortment of merrily topless women, hanging around with his troll of a fellow dentist best bud (Dan Fogler, in full Jack Black mode) and making goo-goo eyes while ardently pursuing Alba, who looks luscious but whose comic chops won't give sleepless nights to, say, Isla Fisher, Rachel McAdams or Katherine Heigl.

When it comes to recent sex comedies, we're spoiled by the likes of Wedding Crashers or output from the Apatow factory, movies that go for the throat sexually, but are also shot through with sweetness, smarts and great supporting characters. Good Luck Chuck, not so much, because it plays like one of the Farrelly brothers' movies that didn't quite gel. Instead of heart and great dialogue to go along with the raunch, we get a heap of fat-girl jokes (the very large, very funny Jodie Stewart promises Charlie, "I'm gonna ride you till you die!"), pratfalls from Alba and a slew of comic situations we've all seen done better and funnier.

The assembly-line feel of Good Luck Chuck defeats the best efforts of Cook and Alba who, under different circumstances, might have worked just fine together. Better luck to them, and us, next time.

By Stephen Rebello

Photo credit: Sergei Bachlakov/Lionsgate