My Best Friend's Girl: Movie Review (2008)

When it comes right down to it, the less said about the new Howard Deutch comedy, “My Best Friend’s Girl,” the better. But in lieu of that, let’s just tackle it, vilify it, screw it to the wall, rip it down and send it back into the sewer from which it came.

More than anything, the movie wants to capture the same raunchy heart of a film produced by Judd Apatow (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Superbad”), but since Deutch and his screenwriter, Jordan Cahan, fail to possess similar levels of finesse and intelligence, the movie tanks in the absence of each.

Speaking of tanking, the film did just that at the weekend box office. How about that for a surprise? But more prophetically, the tanking doesn’t stop there since the movie also stars Dane Cook as Tank, a man whose methods for reigniting love among damaged couples are as unconventional as they are uncomfortable to watch.

Since Tank is one of those charismatic bad boys some women with zero sense tend to fall for, he has decided to make something of a career of it. His M.O. is this: When a woman leaves her boyfriend, Tank whores himself out for a price in an attempt to get that woman back into her ex’s arms. Tank does so by wooing her with his smoky, smoldering, pockmarked good looks--and then he turns her off by taking her out on the most revolting date of her life.

The reasons behind all this are as crude as they are simple. By turning her off so violently, the idea is that the woman in question will suddenly snap to her senses and realize that her ex really wasn’t so bad after all.

What that says about women is about as flattering as spandex on a corpse, but here, they’re so stupid, they actually fall for the gimmick. The exception is Kate Hudson’s Alexis, who is dating Tank’s rigid roommate Dustin (Jason Biggs) when she decides to dump him for falling for her too quickly and too hard. Naturally, Dustin hires Tank to work his magic on Alexis. And right there, when these two meet, the movie mounts one massive wave of predictability it never overcomes.

Beyond that little caveat and the fact that the movie doesn’t know what do with its ongoing run of raunch, which can be funny when done well (Apatow is a master of it) but which here just feels shoehorned into the script to serve its intended audience, is that the movie isn’t funny. That’s it’s real undoing.

There is one exception in Alec Baldwin, who enjoys a cutting, fleeting cameo as Tank’s father before he gets out before the script can stain him. He’s so good here that within 10 minutes of his leaving, you want to beg the producers to give him a larger part.

But no such luck. “My Best Friend’s Girl” is for another demographic, one who Hollywood believes only wants to see Biggs as a buffoon, Hudson as a ditzy chick and Cook as a creep. Given the film’s disastrous showing at the box office, they might want to reconsider that.

Grade: D