REVIEW: My Best Friend's Girl

MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRL

By: Lee Rice

After the release of ‘There’s Something About Mary,’ pretty much every major studio jumped on the romantic comedy bandwagon for a solid slate of releases along the same lines. It also cemented Ben Stiller’s career as one of the reigning kings of romance, leading to the recent ‘Heartbreak Kid,’ one of the most idiotic romance movies of all time.

Well move over, ‘Heartbreak,’ because there’s a new kid in town.

‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ is a vapid, insipid, and worthless romantic comedy that hits bottom so hard, you can actually hear Dane Cook’s career breaking.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good romantic comedy. Adam Sandler’s ‘The Wedding Singer’ is still one of my favorite movies of all time, and ‘Meet the Parents’ is probably the best “Murphy’s Law” comedy of all time.

The problem is that ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ goes absolutely wrong in every way that those classics went right.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lack of chemistry between the main characters. Dane Cook plays a guy named Tank who gets paid to date other men’s girlfriends after they go through a break-up. While on the date, he makes an incredible mess of things in order to scare the girl into taking the guy back. The film’s title comes from an incident in which his best friend, played by Jason Biggs, asks him to do the treatment on his girlfriend, played by Kate Hudson.

As expected, she proves hard to scare off, Tank finds himself falling in love, and his poor best friend starts trying to win her back.

Sounds like a good premise, but I didn’t feel for a second that Biggs cared about Hudson, that Cook could fall in love with her, or that she could care about either one of them. At any given moment, I expected all three of them to just say, “Screw it,” and start making a sandwich.

That brings me to my next complaint, that ‘MBFG’ couldn’t make up its mind who the movie was about until the second half.

The first half of the film fluctuates wildly between Cook’s character and Biggs’ character as the focus of the story, never settling into either corner until the final half. By then, it’s way too late to start caring about Tank.

As for the comedy, it seems to vary between unfunny, and unfunny and gross. Frankly, if you want a romantic comedy with Dane Cook in it, I’d check out his much better ‘Employee of the Month,’ a film that is funny and genuinely entertaining.

I will confess, there was a little spark toward the end that told me that this could have been a decent movie, but the fact is that it was far too little, far too late.

‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ is the worst movie I’ve seen this year. If you want to experience this putrescent tank of Hollywood schlock, you can save your money by staring at the poster and punching yourself in the groin for an hour and a half. It costs less and you might wind up having more fun.

Final Verdict: F-