Good Luck Chuck

It's a romantic comedy starring Jessica Alba and some other idiot. It is, of course, going to be terrible, but there is a natural limit to quite how terrible such things can be. Isn't there?

A pint of milk that's past its best may have separated and turned into stinking, poisonous gunk, but, surely, nothing worse can happen to it. Well, imagine a pint of sour milk with a rat in it. And the rat's got a machine gun. And the machine gun spits radioactive poo as well as bullets.

So what is the added element that drags Good Luck Chuck into the silt beneath even bottom- feeders such as Daddy Day Camp? The plot is, certainly, no more idiotic than those of half a dozen other recent sex comedies. Dane Cook, a comic of whom I have not previously heard and of whom I would not like to hear again, plays a dentist saddled, since his teenage years, with a curse. Immediately after he has sex with a woman, she will leave him and encounter the man she is destined to marry.

When he falls in love with Ms Alba - who is clumsy and works with penguins - he is, thus, confronted with something of a dilemma. Should he hop on her and risk triggering the curse or should he remain chastely frustrated?

The performances are only averagely appalling, and the dialogue is better than that in many Rob Schneider films. But

the attitude towards women is so jaw-droppingly vile that all decent folk will want to shower in carbolic acid after even glancing the poster.

Whereas Alba plays coy peekaboo with the audience, a hundred other less famous women are asked to thrust their bosoms at the camera while bouncing lubriciously on Cook's unlovely body. The characters they play are - like all women, you see - fanatically obsessed with marriage and will do anything to get that ring on their finger.

Gender wars were fought to stop this sort of thing. Stay well away. You should, indeed, have pulled on rubber gloves before reading this review. DONALD CLARKE