Column:

Dane Cook tanks 'My Best Friend's Girl'

By Joey Vergara

Published Oct. 2, 2008

When watching "My Best Friend's Girl," it's important to keep in mind who the three leads actually are. There's the aggravating, loudmouth comedian-turned-actor, Goldie Hawn's romantic comedy typecast daughter and the guy who stuck his dick in a pie for some cheap laughs almost 10 years ago. Expectations should be a little low.

And, still, it's a surprisingly superficial and pandering film.

Dustin (Jason Biggs) plays the sweet guy in the way this film cliché is always sweet - a little stupid and incredibly desperate. In an effort to win back the girl of his dreams (after only five weeks of dating, mind you), Dustin hires his best friend, "Tank" Turner. A professional worst first-dater, Tank is employed by screw-ups to take ex-girlfriends on dates so absurdly horrible that they can't help but return in tears and apologies. The logic behind such a scheme is dodgy at best, but the plot continues.

Playing the anti-"Hitch," an emotionally shallow bad boy who drops girls as easily and often as his trousers, Dane Cook finds new lows in comedy. He looks like a wrinkly, 50-year-old chain-smoker, but he's banging all the honeys on the street? On the flip-side, Cook is in the business of making laughs, and you have to give it to him - he's a showman, even if he indulges the lowest of comedic common denominators.

"My Best Friend's Girl" suffers most from its identity disorder. A surprisingly large portion of the movie is devoted to Cook's bizarre sexual and professional antics at the expense of any real humor. After an hour and a half of all the gross-outs I could stand, I was left wondering what I had witnessed. The film ends up a hybrid of a teen sex comedy and a romantic comedy. As far as filmmaking goes, both genres really leave a lot to be desired, and "My Best Friend's Girl" suffers from the flaws of both.

Any attempts to humanize the "asshole" are inherently bound to be frustrating letdowns (he's an asshole, remember?), yet "My Best Friend's Girl" tries to do just that. Even before the plot begins, the slightly creepy, yet kind-natured Dustin should have nothing to do with Tank, but they are "best friends." All he gains from said friendship are missing eyebrows and more girl problems than ever.

Bringing in Tank's sex-crazed gender studies professor father (Alec Baldwin) is simultaneously a very weak last-minute attempt to rationalize Tank's issues and an opportunity for the dirtiest jokes of the film.

In the most telling scene of the film, Dustin refers to himself and Alexis as Harry and Sally in an unusually self-reflexive cinematic move for "My Best Friend's Girl." The punch line is not that he won't be able to get back together with his Sally, but that, for all intents and purposes, the romantic comedy of Rob Reiner's era has been bruised beyond repair. Even movies like "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" balance the vulgar with a certain humanity that "My Best Friend's Girl" passes up. The smart humor and substance of "When Harry Met Sally ..." have been traded in for dick jokes and superfluous scenes of a semi-nude Hudson being straddled by saggy Cook.