Good Luck Chuck is a 2007 American Romantic Comedy film where lots of women want to sleep with Dane Cook for some contrived and difficult-to-explain reason.
When Charlie Logan (Cook) was ten years old, he was cursed by a teen goth after he refused to kiss her during Ten Minutes in the Closet. The curse causes any woman Charlie sleeps with to find their soulmate in the next man they meet.
Twenty-some years later, Charlie works as a dentist, and is still cursed. Every woman he's had sex with has broken up with him and immediately married the next man she met. Charlie is invited to the wedding of one of these women, and there he meets Cute Clumsy Girl and Love Interest Cam (Jessica Alba). By a twist of fate, Cam chips her tooth by falling while working in a penguin habitat, and goes to Charlie to get it fixed. He asks her on a date in return, and she agrees.
Meanwhile, Charlie's friend Stu (Dan Fogler) convinces him to take advantage of his curse and have sex with any woman who comes his way. He does, and each woman gets married soon afterward.
Afraid Cam will marry another man, too, Charlie avoids having sex with her at all costs. Hilarity Ensues.
Not to be confused with Good Luck Charlie.note
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abhorrent Admirer: The fat, acne-ridden Eleanor Skepple starts out as an inversion, since Charlie has to pay her for a date in order to test whether he is cursed such that any woman he sleeps with to marry the next man he meets. But once he explains he wants to "get physical," she becomes terrifyingly eager about the whole thing, and he is shown frantically scrubbing himself in the shower afterward.
- Affectionate Nickname: Cam says he brother calls her "Murphy" as a reference to Murphy's Law due to her being The Klutz.
- Animal Motifs: Cam loves penguins, and has several objects and decorations around her house themed around them. Even her underwear has penguins on them.
- Bathtub Scene: Cam and Charlie and both having bubble baths while talking to each other on the phone.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The only damage Cam seemed to receive from falling on an ice slide is a chipped tooth.
- Blessed with Suck: Whoever Charlie sleeps with will find their true love. Naturally, Charlie himself will never find true love.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When Charlie tracks down Anisha, the goth girl who cursed him, she doesn't even remember the incident in which she cursed him. But it gets subverted in the finale, when we see her taking a Voodoo Doll of him from her closet and removing a needle from it, implying she's removing the curse now that he has apologized.
- But I Would Really Enjoy It: Charlie doesn't want his curse to affect Cam, so he avoids sleeping with her, despite he really wanting to. It doesn't help she keeps accidentally getting into fanservice situations with him and brags to him about being really good in bed.
- Butt-Monkey: Both Charlie and Cam seem to share this role throughout the film, as both suffer Amusing Injuries, and go through other humiliating situations.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Stu is a plastic surgeon, and says his job makes "the world a better place" by giving women bigger breasts.
- Casanova Wannabe: Stu sees himself as a confident ladies' man, but his crude flirting mostly repulses women.
- Caught with Your Pants Down: Charlie walks in on Stu masturbating with a grapefruit.
- Chick Magnet: Charlie
- Childhood Friends: Charlie and Stu and been Best Friends at least since they were kids, considering Stu was around for the prologue when Charlie was 10.
- Comedic Underwear Exposure: A rare female example; in one scene, Cam accidentally gets her skirt ripped off by a car door, exposing white panties with a penguin on the front.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: After sleeping with Cam, Charlie becomes very paranoid she will leave him for another man, to the point he even attacks a guy just for talking to her (he was her hairdresser).
- Cringe Comedy: About midway through the movie, Charlie goes into full-on overbearing stalker mode.
- Cursed with Awesome: Stu has this opinion on Charlie's curse of having the woman he sleeps with finding their true love right after means he can never have a long-term relationship, but it's magnificent for one night stands. Charlie initially agrees, but soon enough finds all the meaningless sex to be unfulfilling.
- Cute Clumsy Girl: Cam is constantly knocking into things and tripping over stuff. This is up to eleven, as she's broken multiple bones as a result, yet remains a beautiful nice girl. Charlie seems to particularly find this endearing, comparing her to a penguin who is "awkward and clumsy on land, but beautiful in the water".
- Destructo-Nookie: When Charlie and Cam finally have sex, they end breaking stuff all over her apartment. She even drops him on the floor while they're in bed.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Chuck refused to kiss a girl during their Ten Minutes in the Closet and got cursed by her that every woman he would have sex with would end up finding their true love not long after. This doesn't actually bother him that much until he fell in love with Cam.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Charlie is repeatedly coerced, at least guilted into a hookup by women. This is however Played for Laughs.
- Erotic Eating: One of the movie posters has Cam doing this to an ice-cream cone.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Curiously averted, as despite the title Charlie is never called "Chuck" in the movie.
- Experimented in College: When Charlie and Cam meet at his exes wedding, Cam reveals to him she used to date her as well, as an experimental thing while both women were drunk.
- Fanservice Extra: The Sex Montage features a gaggle of nude breasts and butts.
- Fan Disservice: Eleanor Skepple, a Fat Slob whose body is covered with acne, is shown in a bikini. It even has a Gross-Up Close-Up of her acne!
- Fat Slob: Eleanor Skepple is an extremely obese and slobbish woman that eats food like a pig with her hands and farts constantly.
- Freakiness Shame: Stu towards his three-breasted patient, whom he marries.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Cam's bedroom is filled with stuffed penguins.
- Goth Girls Know Magic: The goth girl Charlie turned down apparently cursed him as a teenager. As an adult, she's not goth, but still knows magic.
- Grand Romantic Gesture: After Charlie sleeps with Cam, he lavishes attention on her in the hopes that she won't move on after they've had sex, such as sending an entire room worth of flowers to her workplace, or hiring a quartet to sing for her. However, a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs when Cam gets unnerved by the change in his personality and newfound clinginess.
- Gray Rain of Depression: Charlie sits sadly in the rain after Cam breaks up with him for his newfound clinginess.
- Groin Attack:
- Cam ends up spilling a hot drink on Charlie's crotch when they first meet. To make matters, worse, her attempts to wipe have another effect on him.
- When Charlie falls into the lake on the penguin habitat, one of the penguins bites him in the groin.
- Head-Turning Beauty: Cam is incredibly attractive, and is even introduced with a slow-mo walk when Charlie sees her for the first time. It quickly gets ruined when she runs into the waiter.
- Intimate Telecommunications: Cam tries to have phone sex with Charlie while both are soaking in their own bathtubs.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: When Charlie calls the penguin expert Howard Blaine and sets up a blind date for Cam.
- Karma Houdini: Despite every awful thing he put his friend Charlie through (and being a generally terrible person), Stu's only comeuppance is... marrying a hot woman with an extra breast.
- The Klutz: Cam is extremely accident-prone, and has even injured herself countless times. Charlie suffers many Amusing Injuries at her hand over the course of the story.
- Leg Focus: Cam stretches her leg out of the water in order to turn off the faucet during her Bathtub Scene.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Whether Anisha had anything to do with the curse is left ambiguous.
- M.D. Envy: Charlie becomes insecure when he finds out his romantic rival is a "real doctor", while he's a dentist.Stu: He's a heart surgeon. You're a dentist. It's like saying General Patton and Colonel Mustard are both military men.
- Modesty Bedsheet:
- Cam and Charlie are seen under one after they sleep together for the first time. The sheets are naturally, penguin-themed.
- Completely Averted in the fairly explicit Sex Montage scene.
- Ms. Fanservice: Cam is very attractive and is seen in various stages of undress during the film.
- Multi Boobage: Stu winds up with a woman who has three breasts (as we see at the end).
- Never Trust a Trailer: The initial TV ads placed all of their emphasis on Cam's clumsiness. The titular "good luck" curse that drives the movie, where any woman he has sex with meets her "true love" soon after, is never mentioned, making it seem like the movie is all about Jessica Alba being cute and losing clothing rather than Dane Cook doing love scenes, which was probably the right move. They did eventually start running commercials that focused on the curse, though.
- Not Good with Rejection: The entire plot happens because of this attitude of a Magical Goth Girl towards Charlie, when he refused to make out with her when they were children.
- Pac Man Fever: When Charlie is shown playing Xbox 360, it's clear neither the controller or the Xbox itself are turned on.
- Post-Coital Collapse: The Sex Montage ends with Charlie collapsing into bed next to a girl, who quickly makes her way out now that she's now eligible for his curse to take effect on her.
- Race for Your Love: The Climax is this, with Charlie racing to get to Cam before she flies off to Antarctica. Subverted in that when he gets there, she reveals she's only going for a couple of days and the guy he thought she was going out with is actually already married, so there was no actual need for rushing. But she still finds the gesture romantic so she still pulls him for a Big Damn Kiss anyway.
- Sex Equals Love: When Charlie and Carol have sex on the beach, Carol happily blurts out "I love you, Charlie.", and gets upset when he replies with just "That's nice" and then expresses his misgivings about using "the 'L' word" as he puts it.
- Sex Goddess: Cam brags about being one, whispering in Charlie's ear that she will give him "the best night of his life". We never find if it's true, but it serves to further frustrate Charlie in his decision to avoid sleeping with her.
- Sex Montage: Charlie is shown having sex with many women in a variety of positions when he decides to take advantage of his "power", including a lot of The Grunting Orgasm and The Immodest Orgasm.
- Sexy Coat Flashing: Charlie finds his secretary wearing a trenchcoat inside his apartment, which she drops to show she's wearing lingerie when she reveals she's there to seduce him after learning about his curse.
- Sexy Man, Instant Harem: Played With. Charlie is "cursed" with the ability to have any woman who has sex with him find true love within a few days. The reason the word is in quotation marks is because apparently in this universe, women are so desperate for true love that they'll start throwing themselves at Charlie with abandon based, but not because they're attracted to him in particular, but solely on the Internet superstition that they'll find true love afterward. It does have the negative side-effect of sex instantly killing any relationship he's in, however. His secretary does note that it's on some kind of urban legend site, and hasn't been debunked yet. As the girl who jumped Charlie in the car pointed out, it's more of a "what have I got to lose" sort of thing.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Stu's fiancée Lara isn't bothered at all by Charlie seeing her topless.
- Shirtless Scene: Cam's stoner brother Joe is randomly shirtless when he first meets Charlie, and she keeps asking him to put a shirt on.
- Shout-Out:
- The film's poster pictured above is obviously an homage to the famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover picture
◊ of a naked John Lennon caressing Yoko Ono. - Most of Cam's penguin memorabilia comes from Mary Poppins.
- The film's poster pictured above is obviously an homage to the famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover picture
- Shoulders-Up Nudity:
- Charlie's only ever seen from the waist up during the Sex Montage and Shower of Angst scene.
- When Lara flashes Charlie, the camera only shows her bare back or from the shoulders up.
- Shower of Angst: Played for Laughs. After Charlie sleeps with Eleanor Skepple, the next scene shows him furiously scrubbing himself in the shower as he screams.
- Spin the Bottle: The Ten Minutes in the Closet game at the start of the film is decided with this, with Charlie visibly disappointed when his turn points to the goth girl.
- Stalking is Love: Enforced, on both sides. Cam reacts reasonably creeped out by Charlie's overbearing behavior until her brother enlightens her that she should be happy. Anisha makes Charlie realize he should let Cam go, until Stu and his bride nag him to travel to Antarctica after her. Since this is a rom com.
- The Stoner: Cam's brother Joe has being stoned as his defining trait, with her commenting he constantly smells "like bong water".
- Stripping Snag: Cam has her skirt ripped off when it gets caught in her date's car door, exposing her penguin-adorned panties.
- Ten Minutes in the Closet: One that ended poorly kick-starts the plot, as Charlie refused to make out with the girl and she cursed him in return.
- Tongue on the Flagpole: The movie ends with Charlie and Cam getting their tongues stuck together when they kiss in Antarctica.
- Toplessness from the Back:
- Cam's naked back is seen when she takes of her shirt during her strip tease for Charlie, alongside some Sideboob as she steps out of frame.
- When Lara flashes her Multi Boobage at Charlie, we only see her from the back or from the shoulders up as she lifts her shirt.
- Trash of the Titans: After his break-up with Cam, Charlie becomes too depressed to clean his apartment, and it becomes filled with trash and discarded food.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Anisha, when she's trying to seduce Chuck in the closet during Seven Minutes In Heaven, strips down to her bra and pants, asks to see Chuck's genitals, aggressively throws herself at him, attempts to make love to him despite his obvious resistance and scratches his chest telling him how it's supposed to increase pleasure based on what she's read in her mother's Cosmopolitan magazines. And she's only 13 while trying to seduce the 10-year-old Chuck during all this.
- Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Chuck discovers one of the many women he sleeps with to help them find their true love was formerly his classmate — and a man.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: One woman stores a condom in her bra, which Charlie calls the "secret boobie place".
- Wardrobe Malfunction: Among the many mishaps happening to accident-prone Cam, she rips off her skirt by exiting Charlie's car, revealing penguin-adorned panties. She has a minor Naked Freak-Out as he returns her ruined skirt.
- With Friends Like These...: Stu is just the worst friend possible for Charlie... or anyone for that matter. He's constantly making perverted or disgusting jokes, gives Charlie a lot of bad romantic advice, and even lied to him about going out with Eleanor Skepple and isn't even apologetic about it.
- You Can Leave Your Hat On: Cam does a striptease for Charlie when he's on the phone with Stu, trying to seduce him into dropping the call and coming to bed.
