"My Best Friend's Girl" Review - Written by TonyD

“My Best Friend’s Girl”
2008
*½ out of ****
Director: Howard Deutch
Cast: Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs


There is something about “My Best Friend’s Girl” that I just can’t give my precious BOMB rating to. There are some scenes that are downright hilarious and should belong to a film like “Borat,” and then there are some scenes that are similar to the ones in Dane Cook’s last movie “Good Luck Chuck,” which are unfunny and boring. But I have to admit – “My Best Friend’s Girl” is a step up for Dane Cook, who I thought couldn’t be funny if the guy was given jokes to just repeat. And the funniest part about this is that Dane Cook gives the best performance of the movie.

And I’m typing that out with a straight face.

Dustin (Jason Biggs) is madly in love with Alexis, (Kate Hudson) but she isn’t in love with him. So he goes to his roommate/best friend Tank (Dane Cook) and asks him to work his magic so Alexis will come back to Dustin. If you haven’t seen the commercials and you don’t know what his magic is, all you got to know is that he acts like an asshole on their first date together. The problem is that when Tank does act like an asshole with Alexis, she doesn’t fall for it, but instead, Tank and Alexis sleep together. When Dustin figures out that there is some other guy in Alexis’s life, he walks into her house to see Tank and her running down the stairs. I bet you can tell what goes from there.

The funniest scenes are when Dane Cook is trying to offend the girls he is on a date with. The first one, at the very beginning of the movie, kept me laughing throughout the entire montage (or countdown, depends the way you look at it). I thought that after this montage that it would keep me laughing throughout the entire movie, but after that, a lot of the movie dragged out and Dane Cook lost his asshole vibe that he had going on. Though the countdown comes back again with twenty minutes before the movie ends, the movie takes a pause of laughter throughout the flick. (Actually, now that I think about it, there is one very funny scene in the middle of the movie dealing a Christian woman and a pizza shop.)

Some of you are probably asking why I was laughing at a Dane Cook movie. Don’t I HATE Dane Cook? Yes, I still do, but I’m not going to lie: his character in “My Best Friend’s Girl” works because he is playing no one but himself. In “Good Luck Chuck” he plays a doctor who isn’t an asshole, but just a confused guy about this rumor that surrounds him. His character is unaware of his circumstances in this movie, but he uses the women for sex just to make sure that his tale is true. He’s not intentionally being an asshole, but the more that the audience thinks about it, he is.

But I think Dane Cook should get an Oscar nomination just for playing himself so damn well. He is playing a true asshole, and this time he isn’t doing it with a bunch of people in a stadium just waiting to hear him with their “BAMF” t-shirts on. According to the film’s IMDb page, the director allowed the cast, especially Cook, drag away from the script and improvise their own lines. I’m just wondering how come this guy can’t act like this during his stand-ups.

Everyone else, not so much though. For the past few years, Jason Bigg hasn’t done ANYTHING good. After “American Wedding,” he is just craving for a good role. Between his role here and in “Over Her Dead Body,” I’m getting tired of seeing this guy playing a prude. I want to see him branch out. This guy could do a decent job if he spread his horizons a little bit, like acting in a serious drama or something. He’s not given too much to do here, especially for being a main player.

Kate Hudson hasn’t had too good of a year either. After starring in “Fool’s Gold” earlier this year, which was terrible and I don’t even think a great actress could have saved this movie, I think she tried to make a comeback here, but she doesn’t do a good job at all. She acts like a female Keanu Reeves – bland, tired, and money-hungry.

And I’m sure that the same can be said with Alec Baldwin, who never actually stars next to her, but has enough scenes next to Dane Cook playing Tank’s sex-crazed father. He’s never actually funny, though Dane Cook claimed on his MySpace blog that he was easily one of the best parts of the movie. Sometimes Baldwin goes too far with his humor, and it doesn’t work at all. When Cook isn’t playing a misogynistic coward, it is Baldwin who does.

In the end, I don’t recommend “My Best Friend’s Girl.” There are a few laughs here and there, but in the end it plays off as just another raunchy comedy trying to be “American Pie” mixed in with “When Harry Met Sally.” But if you want to see some good acting from Dane Cook, “My Best Friend’s Girl” is for you.