Good Luck Chuck (2007)

Good Luck Chuck arrives from 2007, a year when a romantic comedy could still be built on the premise that a woman's body is a vending machine dispensing another man's happiness. Dane Cook plays a dentist cursed in childhood by a goth girl with a voodoo doll, doomed to serve as a stepping stone for every woman he sleeps with. Jessica Alba plays Cam, a penguin scientist whose clumsiness is offered as personality. The film was panned, nominated for Razzies, and named the worst picture of the year by at least one British critic. None of that troubles our ledger here, which concerns itself only with the ideological freight.

On that front, the cargo is light. The cast is white to a degree that suggests a Vancouver casting call in 2006, with one Black actress in a receptionist role that exists mostly to throw herself at the lead. There is no racial commentary, no environmental argument despite the aquarium setting, no class critique, no queerness, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revision. The film does not lecture. It has nothing to say and says it loudly. Its real energy is a mean streak aimed squarely at women, and at a specific woman: a character described in the production notes as morbidly obese, used as a laboratory for the curse, her body the punchline of an extended sequence. This is a film that treats female desire as a joke and female flesh as equipment. Progressive sensibilities are not merely absent. They are the target.

A sommelier of this vintage would note the absence of tannins, structure, or indeed wine. There is nothing here to score above the baseline, and the baseline itself is a ditch. We classify it as a comedy of its era, unimproved by time, and we move on.