My Best Friend's Girl (2008): Dir: Howard Deutch / Cast: Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin, Diora Baird: Painful romantic comedy about temptation. Hopefully thoughtful males will avoid the temptation of treating their dates to this form of entertainment. Dane Cook is enlisted by his best friend to heal his broken relationship by becoming a bad date thus allowing her to reflect back on him. Problem is that they fall for each other. Directed by Howard Deutch who previously made The Whole Ten Yards as well as low grade junk such as The Odd Couple 2 and The Replacements. Concept is conniving before Cook and Kate Hudson are sent through predictable circumstances concluding with a restaurant scene that falls flat in desperation. That particular scene sabotages any potential the leads could have mustered due to its contrivance. Jason Biggs plays his friend whose communication is off but he eventually becomes a predictable prop. Alec Baldwin plays Cook's father as the most interesting subject in the film. His methods have passed down to Cook but it is he that is stealing the moment, not the star. Diora Baird plays Hudson's sister and evidently she was also one of Cook's failed dates. That cannot be a good opening when approaching Hudson. The message is thwarted due to its mean spirited delivery that plays much like Cook's date life here, and that is truly depressing. Score: 3 ½ / 10

This was so great! Loved it. So very funny. Though I did love it, I had a few problems with it…surprise right? I'm picky, I know.First of all, it had way too many, overdone cliché moments. A few examples: Girl in the sunlight, guy doing best friend a favor then falls for girl, big scene towards the end where everything comes out in the open. They had this public outing of all the events and confusion more than once! Once is definitely more than enough. It's too corny for my taste. I hate the public fight and make up scenes.Though hilarious, it was too predictable. I feel like I have seen the same movie 100 times.Example of very similar films: Failure to Launch, Wedding Crashers, Good Luck Chuck If you liked this film you will like all of the above that I mentioned. They all have the same humor and light feel. I liked them all, they are all just too similar.I love Dane Cook but he always plays the same character. He needs to expand out of his type cast.Kate Hudson was great and beautiful, as always.I couldn't really feel bad for the Jason Biggs character. He was the best friend that got screwed over but he was so annoying. It was difficult to like him.Lizzy Caplan was awesome. Her character was one of the best ones in the film.Is Alec Baldwin ever going to play a likable character???

OK a lot of Dane Cook's dialog in this film was like his stand up. At first it is pretty funny and you get some laughs, but then it just goes too far and gets kind of boring. I mean don't get me wrong, there were a few parts that really had me laughing from what he said. But then it would go over the top to the point of not funny. Jason Biggs was not that funny at all. I think there was one part that really made me laugh with him. Since the American Pies, I think his career just died. Kate Hudson was fine. She is always a joy to watch and seems to do a great to decent job whenever she acts. The one side actor that threw me off was Alec Baldwin. Recently, or more like in the past four years, Baldwin has set himself as one character from the show 30 Rock. In this film he was a little like that character, but at points just acted really bad. It was just not the type of movie for him. Other than that, the story line was pretty weak and they tried to make a big ending and failed at that also.

Tank Turner (Dane Cook) is special kind of cad: he is a cad for hire, a kind of mercenary who gets paid by other men to make women's lives miserable. Why would other man pay Tank lots of cash to do such a terrible thing? Well, the men are ex-boyfriends or boyfriend wannabes who believe (probably after a lot of hints) that they are not good enough for these women. So they turn to the one man who is guaranteed to give these women the worst experience of their entire lives: Tank, the Adolf Hitler of dates. The premise alone is interesting. But what makes the first thirty or so minutes of this movie work so well is the amount of imagination and cleverness that went into creating these truly awful dating scenarios. Another important factor is Dane Cook who plays Tank Turner like a natural. His part is not an easy one. He has to be rude and outrageous without turning off the audience. This is harder than it seems because there are many films like "Total Eclipse" where mean spirited performances can and do go terribly wrong. It is also easy in these situations for an actor's performance to come across as forced. Just take Julia Roberts' performance as Erin Brockowitch which was forced and even implausible. But Dan Cook pulls it off and generates the kind of energy and excitement that keeps a film like this going. Kate Hudson (Alexis) is also effective as the foil to Dan Cook. Alexis is the one woman who, in spite of being taken on the worst date of her life, is attracted to Tank Turner. She kisses him outside her apartment and even asks him to sleep over. She is not desperate. In spite of the fact that she spent most of her life looking for a relationship with the right man, she discovers that she likes bad boys a lot more.But after the thirty or so minutes about this story line, the film loses its direction. It honestly does not know where to go next. It chooses the safest way out of this predicament -- the predictable romantic comedy -- and the result is that the film becomes predictable and boring. I suspect that the producers realized their mistake during shooting and tried to make up for it by inserting a couple more "bad date" scenes to spice things up. But those bad dates are clumsily inserted and are really eye sores. Take for example those scenes where Tank Turner misbehaves in the worst way possible at the wedding of Alexis' sister in the hope that his behavior would end his relationship with Alexis. This scene, I think, was meant to be funny. But really it appears cruel and tasteless (comparable to many of the scenes in "Total Eclipse"). And why does it come across that way? The reason is that in the beginning there was a logical reason for Turner's terrible behavior, a method to his madness. But here there was no justification at all. It is just a desperate attempt to generate excitement and laughs in a film that has turned sour long before. Even the Professor Turner character (which is played quite decently by Alec Baldwin) seems like a cheap plot devise to generate laughs in a film that stopped being funny. Finally the end does not work very well either.