My Best Friend’s Girl

Nov 19, 2008
By Monica Hanley

Directer Howard Deutch

I don’t know what is with Hollywood these days and why it is pumping out a string of bad movies. It seems to be the latest trend of mashing together the biggest names possible, add a hint of romance, a bit of comedy and a lot of mean-spirited jokes to make up the typical Hollywood fare this year.
“My Best Friends Girl” is no exception. Starring Kate Hudson, Alec Baldwin, Dane Cook and Jason Biggs, the story weaves a tangled, but not interesting web of lies, love and apparently friendship. Although what Jason Biggs and Dance Cook would be doing together as friends is anyone’s guess.

They both play their typical characters – Tank (Cook) is the obnoxious, vulgar friend mostly interested in sex and not much else. Dustin (Biggs) is the nerdy, yet romantic colleague and a friend of both Tank’s and their collective love interest Alexis (Hudson).
The basic plot involves Alexis thinking Dustin is too good for her when he proclaims his love for her after only a few weeks of dating. Dustin, a man who is constantly trying too hard to impress the ladies, orders a steak dinner when he himself is a vegetarian in order to win over the fair Alexis, a meat lover. However the attempts fail and Alexis dumps him.

Dustin then gets Tank involved, and the two men hatch a plan to get Dustin and Alexis back together. The plan is for Tank to take Alexis out, to show her an awful time so she knows how good she had it with Dustin and she’d come running back into his ever-open arms.
The plan predictably backfires and Tank starts falling for Alexis. Through a series of offensive come-on’s the two somehow end up sleeping together – showing the world that women apparently do love the bad, foul-mouthed ones more than the nice boys.

However, after a few weeks of Tank and Alexis’ fling, the gang goes to Alexis’ sisters wedding, where Tank overhears Alexis saying that she loves him.
Taken aback, the now drunk Tank attempts to show Alexis how crude he really is, in a far too long sequence involving smoking in church, propositioning mothers and the like.
A drunken Dustin then appears on the scene and mistakenly tells Alexis about their plan to show her an awful time so she would get back with him. Alexis gets visibly angry and the rest of the movie has Tank and others trying to convince her to choose the right guy.

In the end she probably makes the real-life choice of men, despite the more “that’s how it should be” choice. That is OK, though, because it’s Hollywood.
I can’t wholehearted, or even halfheartedly recommend this film. The most interesting part was reading the subtitles and learning new and interesting dirty words in Latvian and Russian.
All in all it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it just really wasn’t worth seeing, especially if you were expecting to be entertained instead of just distracted by the film industry.

Now showing Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia

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