Just when viewers thought that Dane Cook's acting career could not possibly get any more ridiculous or redundant, he now stars in another sleazy romantic comedy, My Best Friend's Girl, directed by Howard Deutch.
In the movie, Cook portrays a telemarketer named Tank whose side job is being hired as a rebound date for the exes of his paying male clients. His task is simple: Use crude actions and insensitive comments to send the woman he is "wooing" crying into the arms of her former lover.
Of course, this position leaves Tank without any genuine relationships - that is until his best friend Dustin, played by Jason Biggs, hires Tank to offend the girl he has his eye on, the character of Alexis played by Kate Hudson. Predictably, awkward situations arise as Tank finds himself suddenly falling in love with the one girl who should be completely off limits.
Like other Dane Cook films (Good Luck Chuck, Employee of the Month), My Best Friend's Girl suffers a painfully predictable plot. Events flow from A to B so dryly that the movie barely holds the attention of viewers. The ending is also nonsensical, providing little closure and almost no explanation for the events or character motivations.
The most noticeable flaw of My Best Friend's Girl is that it seems to be a mere outlet for Cook's narcissism rather than a genuine attempt to produce a quality romantic comedy. Almost every scene features stunning and scantily clad females throwing themselves in his sexual path all because he treats them terribly. Acting in a single movie that features this is one thing, but doing two or more speaks to unbelievable arrogance.
The rampant objectification of women that occurs throughout all of Cook's films further adds to this assessment of his personality. America understands that Cook is a successful and relatively good-looking comedian, but it should not excuse him to produce a string of harem films in a desperate and vain attempt to bring his onstage talent to the big screen.
My Best Friend's Girl did serve one or two amusing moments, though most involved cheap gutter humor. Likewise, the movie successfully fulfilled the basic tenets of a romantic comedy, but the minimal satisfaction of a genre's requirements isn't enough.
If Cook is going to insist on acting in these movies and people like Deutch are going to come forward to direct them, would it be too much to ask for something new and innovative within the genre? The only fresh thing in My Best Friend's Girl is an even greater transparency of sexual innuendo than Cook presented in his last narcissistic cinematic venture.