Don't Believe the Hype

A Major Disappointment

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Someone would probably think "9 stars for that?" HELL YES 9 STARS! It's really hard to find a romantic comedy that stays on its purpose: be romantic and funny. Well, 'My Best Friend's Girl' definitely gets there. The jokes are mostly entertaining(it gets a bit cheesy at times, but who cares), the male characters are very well played and Kate Hudson's character is everything I want a female character to be: strong, funny, hot and adventurous.Spoilers:The ending really got me and it was way smarter than most romantic comedies' endings. Dustin's character was obviously cheesy as a part of the plot, but I was just feeling so sorry for him getting his eyebrows shaved, getting his painted eyebrows messy by the rain and being like his big love's gay, shopping friend that it made me uncomfortable. A lot of scenes were great and worthy, but Tank crying while watching 'Ghost', that was priceless!If you need a light and beautiful romantic comedy, watch it without a doubt.

Ho ho ho. Whoever thought this was worth making needs to be forced to watch it three times - I don't think ANYONE could watch this film three times, it could be added to the Geneva Convention's list of prohibited punishments for prisoners of war. Drab, witless and Utterly unengaging lines "she's going to lose her s**t like a s**t-collector with amnesia" are trotted out by deeply unfunny actors. It's like a teenage boy's idea of what makes a good comedy after spending a whole weekend watching Ashton Kutcher movies. Dane Cook is dreadful - there are unpaid utility bills on top of my fridge which are more likely to make me laugh. The characters are highly unlikeable - but their crass personalities are doubtless accurate reflections of the kind of people who were responsible for a) writing this b) producing it. It's baffling, and truly depressing that such films get made.

Kaye Hudson had me on the edge of my seat trying to figure out who she was .. and I never did. All of the characters were horrible. Well acted pigs and shallow humans. Who did I like the most? Probably the extras. An uncomfortable, nasty waste of time. Again, well acted, and almost entertaining, but mostly an uncomfortable ride with little redeeming value.Why do I need more lines of text?OK. What was the moral? There was no moral?Why did the bride marry the groom she married? Who knows?What was the deal with the Bride, her sister, and her mom?No spoiler here, but after you see the movie, you'll want to know.

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.