BACK COVER SYNOPSIS: True love can be a blessing and a curse. She's the blessing. He's cursed. In the side-splitting tradition of "There's Something About Mary" and "Shallow Hal" comes "Good Luck Chuck" - the outrageously hilarious new comedy that proves true love never comes easy! Dane Cook is Charlie "Chuck" Logan, a successful dentist who's something of a good luck charm for women. It seems every girl he has ever dated proceeds to find true love with the very next man they meet. Charlie is happy leading his cavalier lifestyle filled with one night stands until he meets Cam (Jessica Alba) - the girl of his dreams. Now, Charlie will do anything - and anyone - to break the curse and get the girl before she too falls for the next man she meets!

FILM REVIEW: What a stupid film. And let me qualify that by saying it’s not stupid in a good way. There’s an attempt here to blend your traditional romantic comedy with the stupid goof-ball/gross-out comedy that was done very well by films such as “There’s Something About Mary”, but for most of its running time, “Good Luck Chuck” doesn’t manage to work in either category. Save the chemistry and likeable qualities of the lead actors, and the odd endearing moment or good joke here and there, this film is a complete waste of a great premise.

Charlie ‘Chuck’ Logan (Dane Cook) has a problem; after a goth-girl puts a hex on him when he was a kid after he rejected her, he suddenly finds himself leading a life where if any woman sleeps with him, the next guy the woman meets she’ll marry. In uncanny fashion, girlfriend after girlfriend marries the next guy after Chuck and at first he’s a little disturbed by this but after some coaxing from his sleaze-ball friend who can never get laid, he decides to do his job for the female species and sleep with as many as possible in order to help them find their true love and marital partner. Everything’s going well until Cam Wexler (Jessica Alba) enters his life. A clumsy penguin handler, Chuck finally sees a woman he wants to marry but he doesn’t want to hex it by sleeping with her and have her run off with the next guy she meets.

And so ends what it is great about this film; this premise is absolutely brilliant for the romantic comedy genre and could have potentially opened up all manner of comedic and dramatic possibilities. However, the filmmakers seem to make every effort to sabotage whatever avenue an audience can take in getting in to the story and the characters. It starts to go south when Cam’s clumsiness becomes really annoying; seeing her hit her head on poles, crash tables, throw hot wax on to Chuck, locking her keys in the car, having her dress torn off when she gets it caught in Chuck’s car door… it just never stops. The real disaster here is that when Chuck and Cam start spending time together, a real chemistry is brewing between the two characters; but when all the odd-ball crap starts you just say to yourself, “okay… now that’s stupid, enough already!” I just found myself being thrown out of the film and starting to dislike the characters (to tell you the truth, even the actors don’t look entirely comfortable like even they are thrown out of the moment).

Chuck’s sleazy offsider, Stu Kaminsky (Dan Fogler), is really not fun to watch, unless you like that sort of thing. Seeing him get it off inside a grapefruit is gross-out funny but somehow it just doesn’t work in this film. All of the ridiculous sex scenes are reasonably funny, but seeing Chuck lose the plot in the second half of the film when he’s trying to do everything he can to keep Cam is just plain embarrassing to watch, and again, throws you out of the film and makes you dislike Chuck’s character; in fact he almost seems like a different character altogether to the charming, intelligent dentist we were introduced to. But that’s okay, we’re told that there’s a certain madness in love throughout the film. Maybe, but this isn’t real life, it’s a film, and by extension, anything that doesn’t work to keep you interested in the film should be tossed out.

I think the biggest problem with this film is that can’t decide what it wants to be; either a romantic comedy or a gross-out, over-the-top comedy. If it had been either one of those it would probably worked for its genre, but for some reason, the mix of the two just doesn’t work well and as a result you get a film that tries to hit two genres at the same time but doesn’t deliver on their selling points.

“Good Luck Chuck” is unfortunately a waste of time; it’s occasionally funny, has a spectacular premise, but is let down by stupid, idiotic scenes and inconsistent characters that destroy much of what could have been good about watching a film like this.

TECHNICAL REVIEW: The transfer of this film is very good; the picture is well represented on this DVD without noticeable artefacts or other blemishes in the picture. The audio track is likewise of similar quality, and although this is mainly a dialogue driven film, there are some uses for the 5.1 surround sound system with the music and other slapstick sound effects (particularly during the penguin enclosure scenes). A very good transfer.

EXTRAS REVIEW: For such an average film we get a nice collection of extras. The audio commentary from the director, producer, screenwriter and star is funny and informative; at least they had some fun making this film! There are a lot of deleted scenes which don't really add much to the proceedings, a funny blooper reel ad adlib reel, and six featurettes which cover the making of the film (perhaps the two most interesting things here are that there is a real life "Chuck" and the entire movie is based on his unfortunate curse and the 'large' woman who played Eleanor Skepple seemed to be a good luck charm for herself in finding work from this film). Perhaps the most unusual extra is a multi-angle 'Sex-Matrix', where each and every sex position used by Dane in the film is displayed unedited and separate from the way they are edited together in the film, with only a few containing some extra footage. Overall, this is a pretty good collection of extras.

BOTTOM LINE: Rent it, and only if you have a pressing need to see it.