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

Dane Cook looks really handsome enough. Too bad his talent doesn't match his good looks. Some comedians in this day and age, like let's say, Steve Carell, can get away with being bad actors once in a while because they at least have charm and talent inside. But Dane Cook has nothing. No talent, no charm. He is just coarse, crass, cringeworthy, and foul-mouthed throughout "My Best Friend's Girl." His comedy style is an acquired taste, and I can see why.Then there is Kate Hudson. She always had enough charm but what she really needs is a hit. She really hasn't had a hit since being nominated for an Oscar for "Almost Famous" back in 2000, which wasn't a comedy. Since then, she wants to follow the footsteps of her famous mother Goldie Hawn in romantic comedy after romantic comedy. So far, she hasn't found anything yet, and all of her subsequent movies have been flops. Hopefully, a hit will follow her soon.I haven't seen any of the "American Pie" movies, but I realize that when you see the name Jason Biggs, you know he will pop in some raucous gross-out comedy that will satisfy the Generation X crowd.Take these three actors, Dane Cook being the worst one of them all, and put them into "My Best Friend's Girl." There is nothing but vomit jokes and continuous swearing that is never funny. Cook plays the supercool hustler Tank, who is hired by his nerdy close friend Dustin (Biggs) to go out on a date with his coworker and ex-girlfriend, Alexis (Hudson). Tank is the kind of guy who has one night stands women from failed relationships and returns them to their exes. Predictably, Tank and Alexis fall in love. More gross-outs and fights ensue. We get to see less of Dustin, and the story concentrates mostly on Tank with Alexis in the middle. There is a cameo by Alec Baldwin as Tank's equally lecherous and foul-mouthed father. Even Baldwin doesn't help.The movie is too long. The characters are all despicable. Someone like Kate Hudson really knows better, and audience members keep asking themselves "What's a sweet, nice gal like Kate Hudson doing in dreck like this?" Hudson is too perky and sweet to be vulgar. I believe being brought up by Goldie and Kurt, she doesn't seem the gross-out type like let's say, Cameron Diaz, whose gross-out humor from "There's Something Like Mary" was actually convincingly funny, and that's why she was the gross-out queen of the late 1990s. Everyone else acts really nasty in this movie. Dane Cook is just nasty. I don't like nasty humor. 1980s teen comedy director Howard Deutch returns to helm this haphazard train wreck sloppily. A total mess, skip this floperoo, which it was at the box office.

This was one of the best comedies I have ever seen. I literally had beverage spewing out of my mouth. Those who didn't like it? Well they must be more the conservative prudish type. Was it a little raunchy? yes. But thats partly what made it so funny. When you are thinking "o no he didn't" you then see "o yes he did". Dane cook is absolutely friggen hilarious! And anyone who knows dane cook knows his comedy style. So you get what you are expecting. No, you get better! I didn't see this at the movies- it was a rental. And glad I didn't because the laughter would have drowned out the movie! But, it would ahev been worth it. Maybe I just have a dirty/nasty sense of humor, but i have recommended this movie to all my friends and family.

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.