Entertainment

WITH ANY LUCK, YOU WON’T UPCHUCK

‘GOOD Luck Chuck,” a fungal little sex comedy, doesn’t need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.

After a Goth girl put a hex on him at a spin-the-bottle party when he was 10, a dentist (Dane Cook) discovers that his girlfriends always marry the next guy they date after him. Chuck is the last to figure out the situation, but all the women in town keep calling to beg him for some quick sex, figuring he’s a necessary step on the way to the altar.

Chuck takes advantage of the babe overload on the advice of his dirty-talking plastic-surgeon buddy (Dan Fogler, a leering little shrubbery of an actor so unappealing that when he’s repeatedly seen making love to a grapefruit, you want to found a Citrus Rights League to punish him for it).

After meeting his dream girl (Jessica Alba), whose personality consists of pratfalls, Chuck is frantic to break the curse.

The sex jokes, all of them clammy and stale, are reminiscent not of “Wedding Crashers” but of an Eighth Avenue peep-show booth in 1979.

The story arc, which is really more of a story dot, doesn’t even make sense. Why would any guy with an IQ greater than his inseam believe in a dumb curse? Since the consequences of striking out with the girl are the same as the consequences of not trying, why would the dentist spend a long section of the movie avoiding her? And the cure for the curse turns out to have nothing to do with anything we’ve seen in the movie.

Cook, who showed potential as a cool slacker in last year’s “Employee of the Month,” is haggard and desperate this time. His timing is terrible – blame rookie director Mark Helfrich – and he frequently seems to be trying to wrestle laughs out of the air. The script – which is as awkward as a sixth-grader at his first dance – succeeds only during a series of scenes that call for Cook to be intentionally unfunny.

Sometimes, in an attempt to whip up some romantic banter, the writers have Cook and Alba lobbing trivia at each other. “Did you know that the average person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in one lifetime?” she asks. He replies that he produces that much in every kiss, then goes in for some tongue wrestling.

Ah, romance. If only the writers of “Casablanca” had thought of that.

Possibly the only distinction of “Good Luck Chuck” is that it’s the second film in recent weeks (the sweetly odd “Dedication” was the other one) to feature a climax (huh, huh) in which the hero gives a girl a pebble.

The guy sitting next to me at the screening was accosted by a security guard, who thought he might be hiding a camera in his hat. That leaves open the possibility of another distinction: This could be the first movie that doles out more to security guards than it takes in at the box office.

GOOD LUCK CHUCK

Half a star

Chuck E. Sleaze.

Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R (nudity, sex, profanity, drug use). At the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, the Magic Johnson, others.