'Best friend's Girl' disappoints as comedy

Liz Peacock

Staff Writer

Nauseatingly short on laughs and crudely inappropriate, “My Best Friend’s Girl” is not only cliché but offers a series of sexist scenes curiously reminiscent of other movies of its kin, such as “Wedding Crashers,” “Hitch” and Dane Cook’s own “Good Luck Chuck.”

The movie’s most fatal sin though is that it’s simply not funny. It’s actually painfully unfunny, and the only thing to laugh at is how incredibly played out Dane Cook is. Being called an “emotional terrorist” and being compared to the devil (there was even a slow-motion scene where he was in an all-black tuxedo with ravaging flames behind him) simply didn’t fit his usual persona.

This shamelessly derivative flick consists of Tank (the charmless and overdone Cook), who sets out to give girls the worst date of their life in an unoriginal effort to send them running back to their ex-boyfriends, as horrible and cheating as they were.

First-time screenwriter Jordan Cahan’s juvenile and apparently misogynist mind should come with hand sanitizer for its viewers. Here, women are either hyper-religious prudes or raging nymphomaniacs who simply need to be tamed by rebellious losers, such as Tank.

As the opening credit reveals a sickeningly unappealing cast, you still can’t help but hope that you’re not going to be looking at the overly cocky Dane Cook for all 101 minutes. Alec Baldwin plays Tank’s pig father, having coaxed his already ruined son into rating women by the letters of the alphabet.

Dustin, played by Jason Biggs (who, dare we say, has only had one hit movie in his entire career), hires Tank, his best friend and roommate, to win over the heart of his ex, Alexis (Kate Hudson), so that he can send her running back to him (hence the obnoxiously overplayed Cars song that the film gets its name from). They unsurprisingly fall for each other, leaving Tank with the heart-rending choice to keep the girl for himself or shoot her back to his pal whom she doesn’t want to be with anyway.

It wasn’t until Tank gave Alexis’s mother a full frontal view while asking for a certain favor, that I decided this movie had reached an alltime low. A scene where Tank intentionally vomits on Alexis’s sister’s wedding dance floor and destroys her four-tiered wedding cake and a high school prom date later, I decided I had been disappointed enough.

It’s a shame that it has already been ten years since Dane Cook was funny, but “My Best Friend’s Girl” surely doesn’t refute the fact that whether he has potential to come back or not, he shouldn’t try to be funny and play a dark, sexy “emotional terrorist” at the same time.