My Best Friend’s Girl (2008)

Starring: Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin, Lizzy Caplan, Taran Killam, and Riki Lindhome, with a voice cameo from Brad Garrett
Grade: D

Playing the anti-cupid who technically gives love a second chance, Dane Cook stars in what is basically a twisted, R-rated version of Hitch. Sadly, My Best Friend’s Girl is nowhere near as funny, charming, romantic, or entertaining.

Summary

We open with Sherman “Tank” Turner going with his date Rachel (Diora Baird) back to her place. Rachel shuts her door in his face when he tries to enter. Following a cigarette, he knocks on the door and proceeds to ask for a blow job and video stuff to further blow his chances. When he asks why she’s not into it, she gives him ten. Following this, there is a quick flashback to ten instances from their date, with Tank doing literally everything no one sane would do on a first date. This includes talking about the goal of angry sex, groping, double parking in two handicap parking spaces, taking a phone call from his “ex” where he apparently cheated on her with her sister and got her pregnant, taking her to a restaurant where a dog is visibly eating in the kitchen, and playing 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Pussy” under the guise of his stereo being busted and it’s the only song that plays (among other things). Going back to the present, he still asks if he can call her, and she shuts the door in his face again. Rachel calls her ex-boyfriend Josh (Killam) to tell her about this horrible experience and they agree to have dinner the next night. What Rachel doesn’t know was that this all went according to plan, as this is Tank’s side hustle. He gets paid to go on horrible first dates with women, so they come crawling back to the guy they broke up with. When Josh gets his phone call, he’s actually with Tank at a bar and pays him while Rachel talks about her horrible experience.

Immediately after this, Tank approaches two women at the other side of the bar. He offends one with his comments, so she leaves, allowing him to attract the hotter one with his douchebag style. Outside, they start making out. When the girl goes back in to get her purse, Tank sees Josh leaving the bar with another girl. Annoyed, he reminds Josh how he just saved the dude’s relationship AND that Josh is getting married. Though Josh thanks him, he tells Tank he’s not getting married tonight and leaves with the stranger. Regardless, Tank has sex with the hook-up. When he tries to get her to leave because of his strict “No sleepover” policy, she reminds him it’s already 5AM and they both have work, so it doesn’t really matter, and they go back to kissing. At the same time, Alexis (Hudson) is up early and already making her morning smoothie before her jog, as she’s training for a marathon. She tries to be quiet but the blender, along with her getting a phone call from her friend Dustin (Biggs), is enough to wake up her roommate Ami (Caplan). The laidback smoker Ami isn’t too impressed with Alexis’s ambitions. As they talk, they are interrupted by the doorbell. Dustin is already there with coffee in hand and ready to go with Alexis. As Ami makes a snide comment about Dustin’s goody two-shoes appearance, Dustin and Alexis head out. Later, Dustin goes back to his place where his best friend and roommate Tank lives. They refer to themselves as cousins, but they’re not blood related. He goes to Tank’s room and puts a crate full of porn (the Erotic Film Institute’s Top 100) there to hide it because tonight is the night he tries to make things happen with Alexis by telling her how he feels.

Once Tank laughs this off, Dustin makes fun of Tank’s random sexual encounters with strangers only to be interrupted by Tank’s hook-up who was in the room the whole time.

The three walk and talk down the street, with Dustin trying to plead his case that he should go about doing things honestly, but Tank and the girl don’t see Dustin having a shred of a chance with his approach. That night, Dustin takes Alexis out to a fancy steak dinner even though he’s a vegan. Plus, he pays. Finally, he just outright tells her that he loves her. She reminds him how it’s been five weeks since they agreed to keep things light because they’re friends and they work together, but this turns into Dustin trying harder. When she talks about taking steps in a relationship like becoming exclusive or moving in together, Dustin asks her to move in without question. They both agree it feels right, but Alexis is very sure that “It doesn’t feel right, right now”. Dustin is heartbroken. At home, Tank tears up watching Ghost but wipes away the tears as soon as Dustin enters. A frustrated Dustin tries to talk to him, but Tank laughs off his horrible approach again. Getting him to open his door with his “Bate Crate”, Tank offers suggestions on what to do next, jokingly saying stalking could be an option. Then, Dustin suggests he hire Tank, as he is very aware of Tank’s side hustle. Tank is adamant he doesn’t hire family, though him and Dustin aren’t blood related as Dustin points out. Realizing Dustin is serious, Tank makes a speech about how he’s going to make this the biggest “tanking” of his career to the point where Alexis is emotionally scarred and will have no choice but to go back to Dusty, if he is hired officially. After hearing this mini presentation, Dustin backs off and rescinds the offer for now, calling Tank’s approach “emotional terrorism”. He grabs his “Bate Crate” and goes into his room.

At work the next day, Dustin sees Alexis flirt with a co-worker and flips out in a conference room. Unfortunately, it’s surrounded by glass and a couple of his female co-workers see him, so he stops. At Tank’s day job, he works in customer satisfaction for AirMeister, an air purifier machine. As he messes with a customer and checks out the new girl at work with his co-worker (Malcolm Barrett), he gets a call from Dustin. He’s finally in. Dustin meets with Tank at a park where Tank tells him how things will go down. Before Alexis can love Dustin, she has to hate Tank. To get this far though, she has to at least like Tank first. The key is the “Meet Cute”, the moment in a romantic comedy where the two star-crossed lovers meet for the first time. Tank is aware how much women look for this cutesy movie moment, so he sets this up. At this park, he’s going to do the same with Alexis. He gives Dustin some binoculars to watch and heads deeper into the park to act like a jogger. He runs next to her, and they look at each other. She smiles, he trips and hurts himself, and she checks on him. Within minutes, they exchange names and numbers to Dustin’s shock. The first step went off without a hitch. That night, Alexis dresses for her date while drinking and discussing the importance of promiscuity with Ami, as Ami sees Alexis only sleeping with two guys in her life being a major problem. Once she shows off her box of dildos to Alexis, Tank knocks shows up, so the drunk Alexis cuts the conversation short. Right away, Tank tries a few douchebag lines, but she bats them off playfully because of her drunken state. This date might be harder than Tank had initially anticipated.

He tries to pull the stereo trick from the opening, but she loves and knows all the words to 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Pussy” because she almost lost her virginity to the song. He drives her to a strip club for their date and as her behavior continues to throw off his strategy, he finally just jumps to saying they should fuck. She laughs it off, goes to the bathroom, and calls Ami. She tells her Tank is either a massive douche or someone who is trying to convince her he’s a massive douche. Undeterred, Ami makes it clear that she just needs to fuck him for her own good and out of respect for Dustin. When a stripper in the bathroom doubles down with this advice by telling Alexis to listen to the voice in her “clamburger”, she becomes fully convinced that fucking him is the right move. Tank drives her home and though she admits he’s a dick, they still kiss, and she invites him inside. Knowing he’s doing this for Dustin, he declines and leaves, though it’s hard for him. Tank gets home and Dustin tells him it worked! Alexis called Dustin and told him she had the worst night of her life. The next day, Alexis and Dustin have lunch at some restaurant. Unfortunately, Dustin spoke too soon. Though Alexis gives Dustin props for being such a rare “good” guy, her experience with Tank has made her realize how few guys she’s actually dated. Now, she wants to have more dating experiences and thinks Dustin should do the same. She officially “Friend Zone’s” him as well, and he’s hurt. Then, she leaves to go help her sister out with her wedding planning. At work, Tank gets a call from Dustin explaining the situation to him. He wants Tank to take her out again and mess with her even worse this time, but Tank is adamant that “tanking” is an art form, and it can’t just be a balls-to-the-wall approach. When he asks if there’s even a chance that she’d be willing to go out with him again, Dustin tells him he already has this covered.

Without telling Tank, Dustin sent in flowers and an apology poem in Tank’s name. Now, Tank is freaking out a bit, but he’s forced to hang up because he’s already late to a training seminar he’s heading up.

As he walks to it, co-worker Craig (Nate Torrence) approaches Tank to ask for his services regarding religious girl Hilary (Lindhome). They quickly discuss how she’s a high school English teacher and he can pull off the “Meet Cute” at a salon where she gets her hair done every Tuesday, which seems crazy to do on a teacher’s salary but alright. Regardless, Craig is crazy about her, and Tank is his last resort, with Tank confidently reminding him that he’s the best asshole in the business and he’ll make Craig look great comparatively. Immediately after, Tank walks into his training seminar late but he tells everyone they are late and to not let it happen again. He tells them all the first rule: There are no refunds. The beauty of an air purifier is that nobody can prove it doesn’t work. To show everyone how it’s done, Tank asks for the most dissatisfied customer possible to be patched in, so everyone can hear him at work and hear the customer’s response. Unbeknownst to Tank, it’s Alexis and she’s not talking about the product. She called in to talk about the gift of roses and the poem Dustin sent on his behalf. Once she mentions how she offered him a free pass for sex, how big of an asshole he is, and how he turned her down after all of this, it finally clicks in Tank’s head that this is Alexis. All the people at the seminar are laughing and Craig hires him officially on the spot, with Tank exiting the room embarrassed. That night, he heads over to Alexis’s place to explain himself. She’s still angry and talks about how stupid the poem was, and he goes right back into douche mode. They both start insulting each other to the point where they get turned on, and it leads to sex.

Tank gets home and Dustin admits he sent the hundreds of dollars of roses and the poem to her, and Tank tells him to move on. However, Dustin is still hung up on her and tries something different. If she wants to be friends, he’s going to push to be the best friend she’s ever had. It’ll have to work, right? Well, it could, if Tank wasn’t officially fuck buddies with Alexis as this goes on. Eventually, Dustin realizes Alexis has someone in her life but doesn’t know who. At the same time, Tank is starting to like Alexis.

As you would expect, all things fall apart.

My Thoughts:

My Best Friend’s Girl was Hollywood’s final attempt at giving Dane Cook a star vehicle. The character description fits Cook’s style, but the whole film is a mess from top to bottom. For those wondering, this deserves the label of being the final nail in the coffin that was Cook’s career, but this is not me hating on him as a comedian. My hate is strictly towards the movie.

The main character of Tank is an asshole, or at least he’s paid to be. He’s vulgar, he’s a total douchebag, and is all about one-off sexual encounters. There is more to him though. These unlikable qualities are mostly a turned-up act to attract women and it works. Plus, he’s good looking enough to get away with stuff no other man would. The problem occurs right away though. He leans so far into this “asshole” direction that we’re led to believe is an act, that we don’t get any insight into his actual personality. He just starts to look like the asshole he’s acting like is a front. Early on, there’s only three examples that we truly see of his real self. He tears up while watching Ghost, which could hint he’s looking for something more, he does seem bothered by Josh picking up another girl at the bar after he saved the man’s relationship, and the sequence in which he “breaks character” so to speak when on a date with the religious and very sweet Hilary. However, he wipes away the tears when watching Ghost and his sweeter side is never touched on again, making this moment come off as a random and meaningless joke. With Josh, Tank still goes home with another girl, so him feeling bad only lasts seconds until the regret bites him on the ass later when he ends up at the guy’s wedding. Basically, the latter sequence with Hilary is the only time we really see his true self and it’s an hour into the movie. It changes our whole perspective of what the character could have been. All he had to do was let us in earlier for us to understand why he acts the way he does, but by this point it’s almost too late. During their genuine conversation, Tank admits he’s good at “being an asshole” and befriends Hilary over letting her in on his own personal backstory that no one else knows about. This realer dialogue with Hilary isn’t even something he does with Alexis, who is the main love interest of the fucking movie! Hell, he doesn’t even do it with his best friend in Dustin!

Sure, he’s a little nicer with Alexis but never has a true, heartfelt conversation with her to win the audience over in showing us that she’s needed in his life. At most, the audience sees that he just doesn’t act like a dick around her. He’s just normal and smiles a little more. When the best and most revealing dialogue our main character has is with a supporting character that doesn’t have to do a lot with the grand scheme of things, this is a problem. More importantly, the friendship he has with Dustin, and Dustin in general, is an even bigger problem with the overall feature. They consider each other cousins because they’ve been around each other their entire lives, and they live with each other. Why does Tank put on a front for Dustin at all times until he gets caught in the act? Dustin doesn’t know the real side of Tank that Hilary managed to get out of him on one date, and they’ve been best friends since childhood? I don’t see how they can be the best of friends if Tank is never real with him until he fucks up. Even then, the character is too far gone for us to truly feel sorry for him. To make matters worse, Dustin is written to be so sorry as a person that he gets the opposite reaction as well. Casting born-loser Jason Biggs was a good choice to automatically tell the audience “This guy sucks”, but he’s such a loser that we just can’t get behind him. At some point, he just becomes flat-out delusional with trying to win over Alexis. Tank was right. He needed to move on. You can’t be friend zoned twice and manage to overcome it. I don’t think it’s ever happened in the history of man. This is the issue though. We build so much sympathy for Dustin and his continuous downward spiral, that he is treated much more like a protagonist than Tank is because he has something he needs to overcome.

Sadly, he never overcomes anything.

Dustin doesn’t get a win until the mid-credits scene! Though he starts the film as a competent third-billed star, he turns into a “barely there” supporting character by the time the third act comes around. Plus, he gets NOTHING. He just turns into a fucking sap that wants his best friend back, but why would he want him back when he was betrayed and lied to without an apology? Dustin has to approach Tank to convince them to be friends when Dustin did nothing wrong. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Why does Dustin have to convince Tank of anything if he’s the one who got screwed over and over again? This was the last chance Tank had to win over the audience and convince everyone he’s a changed man who’s sorry for what he did, but it doesn’t come off as anywhere close to that. Basically, it turns into Dustin saying, “Wow, I can’t believe you were going to give up that girl you took from me. She’s yours man! I get nothing, and I’m happy!”. Huh?

He literally says, “Yeah, I can’t believe you were gonna give her up for me”. It’s like he’s screaming internally as he says it.

He takes the biggest “L” of his life, sits there with a smile on his face, apologizes, and throws out words of encouragement to the guy that screwed him over? This guy really does suck.

If anyone has seen My Best Friend’s Girl, can you make a good enough argument as to why Tank and Alexis belong together? I’m not even advocating for Dustin here either. I don’t think any of the three main characters belong together with how the story plays out. Considering this is a romantic comedy with certain expectations attached to it, this should show you why this film fails tremendously at its job. Dustin is a pushover, worships the ground Alexis walks on, and is the most desperate man on Earth. You can smell it when he walks into a scene. He carries desperation on his clothes. A high school babysitter offered him $60 in the elevator to jerk him off in the parking lot because he looked that desperate. This should tell you how much the man sucks. No woman wants to end up with a porn-addicted, unconfident, “nice guy”. He’s a good dude, but he’s written so poorly that we can’t root for him, despite him doing nothing inherently wrong. Doesn’t that bother you? Now, that doesn’t give Tank the right to swoop in either. First of all, he’s not nearly as cool as he’s trying to be. The cocky asshole protagonist can work under the right circumstances if the actor chosen exudes coolness no matter what he does (see Robert Downey Jr.). Casting Cook is on the right track, but he’s not quite there. The actor chosen for this role should give off the energy of someone you would want to be, and Tank never does that. Plus, Cook never looked natural smoking a cigarette, but I digress. Regardless, the act of him snaking the girl from his best friend after he asked for his help shows you his true nature and how far he’s willing to go to satisfy his own selfishness. He lies to Dustin’s face when Dustin gave Tank everyday updates on how he’s trying to impress Alexis at work, and he would just nod his head and leave to go bang her every night for months. Why are we supposed to feel bad for him? Because he got caught? Because his dad is Alec Baldwin?

Okay, I take that last one back. That’s a decent reason.

Regardless, just because his dad is a player, it doesn’t make us feel bad for Tank. If the worst thing about his character is that he picks up a lot of girls under false pretenses because his chauvinist father taught him the ways, this doesn’t garner sympathy. It makes sense the way he turned out the way he did, but it doesn’t make us think of the character in a positive, sympathetic light. Even when he’s caught with Alexis, she’s piggybacking him as he takes her down the stairs without a care in the world until Dustin walks in. This was going to keep happening if he didn’t get caught. This is about as close to irredeemable as it gets for a main character. When Dustin tells him to move out after they leave Alexis’s house, can you blame him? Once again, Dustin put every last bit of trust he had into Tank, and he thought Tank was helping and encouraging him. Instead, Tank was fucking the girl of his dreams while doing it. When they start to win us back slowly with Tank acting like a normal person following the date with Hilary, everything comes crashing down with Rachel’s wedding. For comedic purposes, the film needed this sequence, and it was a really cool moment from a cinematic perspective to see Tank flip the switch into his “asshole persona” when Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” comes on to solidify the transition. It also makes sense of Cook’s distracting jet-black hair. I didn’t get it until this moment, but the intention seemed to be for the look to give him the appearance of someone devilish. Though it could be me reading into things a bit much, I couldn’t help but feel that way when it was accompanied with him smoking in a church and the lighting getting dark around him.

Even so, from a story perspective, Tank’s decision to ruin the wedding like he’s being paid for it didn’t seem like a necessary reaction at all to the events that precede it. He loves Alexis and hears her say she loves him. After looking into the mirror and repeating the statement made by his father, he asks himself, “Are you the best it’s ever going to get for her?”. Realizing she can do better, he flips the script and tries to ruin their relationship by ruining the wedding. Why not just leave though? Does this really seem like the right course of action instead of just breaking up with her or something? Considering the character isn’t insane, this off-the-wall solution just doesn’t make sense. Again, it’s funny because Dane Cook being a chaotic psycho saying the most outlandish things possible to garner shocked reactions is similar to what made him popular as a stand-up comedian, but from a story and character perspective, he just goes too far for the character to recover realistically. This sequence is enough to prove to the audience why Alexis and her family would never want to see him again, further intensified with Tank’s final moment of propositioning Alexis’s mom for a blow job and pulling down his pants in front of her. No amount of apologizing could ever save someone from that moment. When he has one last chance to just admit the truth of the situation, he tells Alexis to her face that she was just a “job” he was hired to do when the audience knows the actual details of this are far from this statement and he actually loved her. What’s stopping the character from being honest in this moment? The cover is blown. Why can’t he just be honest with her like an adult? Nothing is holding him back from doing so after his side hustle is outed by Dustin.

Going along with this, how does Alexis look for forgiving him after being publicly humiliated like that in front of her entire family? Then, they want to make Tank look like a sympathetic protagonist out of nowhere, with Josh punching Tank and Tank getting thrown out. Guys, you can’t set up the character to be this “cool guy” prick for 90% of the movie, who’s banging girls left and right, and then make one moment where we’re supposed to feel bad for him. It just doesn’t work. It reminds me a lot of what they tried to do in Employee of the Month with Cook being the “cool guy” slacker at work that everyone loves, but he still tries to play the sympathetic loser trying to get the girl at the same time. Again, it just doesn’t work. Cook isn’t that guy. He never was. It doesn’t fit his looks, persona, or style. You can be the cool, funny, sarcastic, douchey, slacker who gets the girls or you can be the sympathetic and likable protagonist who works to overcome his flaws and win the girl of his dreams. It’s nearly impossible to do both, and they’ve tried it twice with Dane Cook. He just can’t pull it off. He’s too good looking to be a loser, and he’s too much of an asshole here for us to feel bad for him. Maybe it could work if either film was written better or they masked it with hysterical comedy, but they didn’t. To make the conclusion realistic, to make it make sense, or satisfying in anyway, this screenplay needed another rewrite. At the very least, you have to write the character of Tank better. They just never go deep enough with him for us to truly understand him, for us to see his positive qualities, and for him to see why he needs to make up big time for what he’s done.

The third act is the most important part of the movie, and it falls flat on its face because of two irredeemable moments leading up to it. Tank never does enough to gain the sympathy of the audience or win back the trust of Alexis. It just happens, and we’re supposed to accept it. There’s this “Three Months Later” sequence, and they run into each other in an off-chance encounter. Then, they reconcile. How? After everything he’s done, it can’t be this simple. An ending similar to The Break-Up would be a lot more fitting for characters like this. Not that the first two thirds of the film were great or anything, but everything following the wedding was just poorly done. It was illogical, it wasn’t funny, it was badly written, the climax was nothing, and the ending didn’t feel right. It was an all-around terrible job.

If anything, Dustin should’ve been reworked and given a much bigger role of importance to make this more of a love triangle rather than a guy looking in on a relationship that he inadvertently caused, but I get it. They were still trying their hardest to make Cook “The Guy”. With the way things play out as they do though, it makes a hell of a lot more sense for Ami to end up with Tank over Dustin. Speaking of which, I didn’t hate the mid-credits scene, but if they wanted to let Dustin have just a shred of dignity left, it should’ve been the actual ending to the movie because the ending in the restaurant between Tank and Alexis was a strangely boring way to end things.

Alexis isn’t this golden prize either. She’s incredibly wishy-washy throughout this entire process and despite having a good job (I have no idea what she does), she seems to have nothing else in her life figured out. Besides Kate Hudson’s obvious hotness, what draws Dustin to her? They didn’t make a case for it whatsoever. Whether she’s with Tank, Dustin, or having conversations with Ami in private, the unraveling of her poorly written character becomes more and more obvious as time passes. She has no ambitions and no motivations. We know virtually nothing about her. All we understand is that she wants to run a marathon, with this detail only existing for the unfunny climax of the film, and that she has a plain dating life and hasn’t experienced much. This is it. She comes to the realization she should date more after the first bad date with Tank, and that’s the last of what we get to know about her. Following this, we’re just supposed to believe she’s this amazing girl both guys are head over heels in love with, but I just don’t see it. We barely know her. Plus, the character is at a crossroads in her life to where she doesn’t even know what she wants, only adding to the mystique behind her. In the phone call post-wedding, Tank tells Dustin that Alexis is an angel and deserves the best. According to him, this is Dustin, but is she really that amazing or just a normal girl caught between two very different men? Also, she never liked Dustin in the first place, so this moment doesn’t trick the audience at all because we are never teased into potentially thinking Alexis could fall for him. Making my blood boil even further, Dustin has the audacity to tell Tank he earned her because, “If you were willing to give her up, you deserve her”.

In a normal movie, I would agree with you, but in My Best Friend’s Girl, neither one deserve to be with her. She’s not that great either! Again, none of these three should end up together. This is a statement that should never be said when walking out of a romantic comedy, but I couldn’t sum it up any better than that. This screenplay was a failure.

It’s not as funny as it should be for a film trying to be as vulgar and chaotic as possible, but it has its moments. Cook has some funny lines and scenes like the aforementioned ruining of Rachel’s wedding, and Dustin accidentally getting his eyebrow shaved and Tank convincing him to shave the other one to even things out. You can’t help but cackle when Lizzi’s friend refers to him as “Groucho” when he shows up with drawn-on eyebrows after the breastfeeding comment. When Dustin stares through the window of his snacks and porn-filled pigsty of a bedroom with no eyebrows, he did get a laugh out of me for looking like a maniac. The “Jesus Crust” sequence was gold too.

Alec Baldwin was well cast as the slimy, smooth-talking professor of a women’s studies program who regularly has sex with his students and colleagues. I like how he’s essentially turned chasing women into an art form. However, there still seemed to be some details they missed the boat on. It’s implied he taught Tank the ways, and they both can analyze a room full of women and go over certain strategies within seconds. I wanted to learn more about this though. This insight not only would’ve added more comedy but also more to how the characters think and where Tank differs from his dad. At one point, he says he’s not about ranking women by numbers anymore. He’s all about letters. When a woman walks by, he says, “She smells like a “J”?” What the hell does that mean? A “Y” makes sense, but where do the other letters fit in? Are there others that are never used, or is every letter used in some capacity? This is a minor fault, but I can’t be the only one who wants to learn more about how these dickheads think. During the prom sequence, Tank tells some fat kid he needs to pretend he doesn’t give a fuck and women will love it. However, the kid points to how he’s been acting the exact opposite with Alexis and how he’s a hypocrite, prompting an argument between them. It’s played for comedy when it could have given us a better idea in understanding some things about the intentions of Tank as the star and the movie as a whole. A moment like this could have shown the film’s heart and how maybe Tank put on this act to give himself confidence and to show he’s secretly a good guy who just has a formula that works. Then, the kid could’ve used it to try and get some attention from girls with it succeeding. Unfortunately, they just chose to go for the throwaway joke instead. If they played their cards right, they could’ve pulled off both, but they just said, “Fuck it”. Honestly, the screenwriter probably said this a lot when writing this one. There’s some serious creativity somewhere lying in this script, but My Best Friend’s Girl rarely scratches the surface and sticks to exactly what you would expect from it.

This movie did make great use of The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl”. When you make a movie about the subject and the title is the same, the famous song needs to be featured heavily, and this comedy didn’t disappoint on this front, even renewing my interest in the forgotten banger. Side note, this was my biggest problem with Take Me Home Tonight.

Considering the talent involved, My Best Friend’s Girl is nowhere near the romantic comedy it should be. It utilizes its R-rating in a disappointing manner, the lack of depth is startling, the characters become more annoying as time passes, and none of them win you over once it’s all said and done. If anything, it just gets worse and worse as the story progresses, falling off a cliff after the second act. It has some funny moments and has some positives like Lizzy Caplan’s performance, but Dane Cook’s swan song as the main star in a movie is another shot in the dark.