This is how romantic comedies work, and feel free to insert different generic nouns in any particular spot, though by rights they should be used consistently. 1) Boy meets girl. 2) Boy loses girl. 3a) If the circumstances under which the boy lost the girl were at all plausible, boy wins girl back through a completely implausible sequence of actions that would have a boy who was not in a romantic comedy jailed or possibly killed in self-defense. 3b) Else, if the circumstances under which the boy lost the girl were completely implausible, the boy and/or girl return to their senses, upon which boy wins girls back. 4) Happily ever after.

In case you’re wondering, Good Luck Chuck falls under 3b. And by rights, this would be enough information to comprise a good review, because romantic comedies are not known for their innovations. However, there are two additional points worth addressing. Except for Chuck’s troll of a best friend, who is appalling for 80% or more of his screen time, the movie is mostly pretty damn funny, above and beyond reasonable genre expectations. And then there’s Jessica Alba. Maybe I’m on crack and she’s one of those classically hot people that everyone can agree on, but to me she’s more pretty in that girl-next-door kind of way, if admittedly at the top of that particular heap. And since cute trending toward pretty matches my personal tastes a lot more than hot, my point is that she works for me physically. But that kind of thing happens all the time, and would not be noteworthy except that her character (who looks just like her!) is a charmingly clumsy penguin enthusiast and trainer at the local Sea world knockoff, who makes trips to the Antarctic in pursuit of her chosen field. The words “tailor-made” spring to mind, is all I’m saying.

Well, and I suppose if you’re the kind of person who wants to know what a movie is actually about, it’s like this. As a pre-teen, Chuck pissed off a goth girl during a game of spin the bottle, so she cursed him to never achieve love, despite that love would find everyone who he was involved with. And sure enough, as an adult, every time he has sex with a girl and then they break up, she marries her next boyfriend. (To demonstrate this effect to the audience, he has sex with a lot of girls. We in the industry call this a plausible excuse for on-screen breasts.) Then he meets Cam, falls in love with her, and tries to find a way to keep from triggering the curse. I maintain that 3b should have been sufficient information, though.