My Best Friend's Girl (2008) Movie Review

My Best Friend’s Girl tries to be a balanced workable raunchy and romantic comedy. The end result is an unbalanced comedy full unlikeable characters and stale acting from 80’s director Howard Deutch.

Tank (Dane Cook) is an obnoxious and arrogant chud that loves to sleep with women and never looks to settling down. However, his side job is being the date from hell for women so that they will go back to their ex-boyfriend due to emotional distress. This is shown at the very beginning of the film with the recently single Rachel (Diora Baird). Tank’s roommate is Dustin (Jason Biggs), a nice guy that has recently been told by his girlfriend Alexis (Kate Hudson) that she wants to just be friends for the time being. Therefore, Dustin gets Tank to go on a date from hell with Alexis so that he can win her back. However, Tank’s antics backfire and sparks fly between him and Alexis.

Deutch knows how to deliver romance as he did with Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful previously. With My Best Friend’s Girl he does not hold anything back from being offensive or gross, and lets Dane Cook do whatever he wants, in which his character comes across are the most unlikeable person even after his transformation. The script by Jordan Cahan tries to throw in every horror story known about the date from hell method and lets the character fill the space with them. Besides the characters features and believability, it is also hard to buy into the film’s relationship choices or betrayal and redemption as well. There are a couple of chuckles in the film, but it has been done before, and much better.

Dane Cook is an extremely funny stand up comic, which does not transcend to the screen. It seems that he makes an okay supporting ladies man, but he has one range as an actor, over the top. As Tank there is no exception, even with his different turn in the thriller Mr. Brooks, Cook was still a little overboard. Kate Hudson has been given the title as romantic comedy queen, but she does not shine at all in this film as Alexis. She is almost as unlikeable as Cook’s Tank. Jason Biggs plays the nice guy role once again, and who knows why a character of his nature would actually be best friends and roommates with someone like Tank. A bright spot in the film is Alec Baldwin’s notorious chewing of scenery as Tank’s even more sex-addicted and vulgar father.

My Best Friend’s Girl has no balance, it is just crude, mean and demeaning, which was not the entire intention of director Howard Deutch. Deutch wanted to deliver an entertaining raunchy romantic comedy, sort of like There’s Something About Mary, but this film comes nowhere close.