A perfectly reasonable reaction to a viewing of MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRL is to plaintively inquire of an unfeeling universe what the heck was that? Aside from being a complete waste of everybody’s time, it is a tired retread of an earlier, equally time-wasting Dane Cook flick, GOOD LUCK CHUCK. There is a different lady co-star, Kate Hudson obviously overlooking any sane piece of career advice offered to her. Oh, and this time Mr. Cook simulates oral sex with a burrito, not a stuffed penguin. It is a distinction without a difference.
The assumption here is that women are basically self-loathing with variations on that theme that include being uptight or an easy lay. Sometimes they are a combination of the above, but mostly, opines the script, they really don’t know what they want until a bad boy abuses them. That is where Mr. Cook comes in. He plays Tank, the one the nice guys go to in order to win back their girlfriends. The girlfriends that have dumped them because they are so nice. Tank takes them out for a date from hell, a strip club or a restaurant specializing in ptomaine, a quick grope, an offer to allow them to sexually gratify him, and the women, being emotionally backward and desperate to couple up, then beg their nice boyfriends to take them back. Tank, whose other job is customer satisfaction for a company selling air, has made a tidy living at sending the uptight ones back to their boyfriends, and a tidy social life out of a series of one-night stands out of the ones who are not uptight. It’s all going swimmingly until Tank’s best friend, Dustin (Jason Biggs), is rejected by Alexis (Ms Hudson), the co-worker he adores but who just wants to be friends with him. Naturally Tank is smitten, naturally Alexis wants a walk on the wild side.
The only creative effort in the entire film is the challenge of how many times Ms Hudson can say the word “asshole” in 30 seconds. It’s an impressive number, and the only thing that even remotely approaches the concept of impressive in the entire experience. To be fair, though, the Cheesus Crust pizza visual, with the cruciform pie was piquant.
Instead of having the integrity to be true to what it is, a rude, crude, and lewd exercise in filmmaking aimed at the lowest common denominator of the male id, it dares to attempt something more substantial. Even as it has Alec Baldwin as Tank’s college professor father quoting Betty Friedan while ogling the assets of the nubile co-eds in his class, the script also attempts to go all warm and fuzzy. It succeeds. But it is the warm and fuzzy stuff that grows on a compost heap after a heavy rain. Cook, with his cold dead eyes is superb as the word Ms Hudson repeats ad nauseam, but when he goes for selflessness, he comes up with something that would be laughable if it weren’t so emotionally vacuous. Biggs continues to work his essential AMERICAN PIE-ness, and Hudson has lost much of the fizz that made up her charm.
MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRL is not quite the end of civilization as we know it, but it is a signpost along the way.
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