Dentist Charlie (Dane Cook) has become known as a good luck charm, so women are begging to sleep with him. Once you’ve bedded him, you meet your true love and get married. So hey, he’d be doing them a favour, right? Cue endless montages of Cook servicing a series of unfeasibly attractive women. Add Jessica Alba into the mix and you truly have a 14-year-old boy’s fantasy. She’s Charlie’s ideal woman: cute, penguin-loving and accident prone, so she bumps into lamp-posts while he’s wisecracking.
But this rom-com is seriously lacking in the laugh department, never mind the aimless narrative based on some hocus pocus about a curse (this was originally a short story, and it shows). Alba and Cook do have charm and a hint of chemistry, and there are moments when his natural comic ability peeks through (probably a rare moment of ad libbing). But the script is so reliant on wish-fulfillment it forgets to add those important little touches: you know, wit, sincerity, characterisation, that kind of thing… A very cheap shot – and hardly anyone calls him ‘Chuck’.