"My Best Friend's Girl Friend"

Beauty is skin deep.

So, unfortunately is My Best Friend’s Girl, directed by Howard Deuton, written by Jordan Cahan.

As an anti-romantic comedy, it’s got promise, an early edge, but it quickly dulls.

Dustin (Jason Biggs) is in love with colleague/marathon partner Alexis (Kate Hudson). As friends, things are ducky. But then he, the romantic sap, goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like “I love you.” When she responds with “Let’s be friends” (girl code for a semantic moat; no longer than they just be friends), Dustin calls in the heavy artillery, his roommate/best friend Sherman “Tank” Turner (Dane Cook), professional asshole. For a fee he subjects friend-girls of slighted men to emotional terrorism so that the slighted men suddenly look a lot better, comparatively speaking.

Tank is a pro. the movie opens with his patented m.o.: ten ways to tank a date. He really is an asshole. To get over good guy Dustin, she turns to bad dude Tank. Amazingly (for us as well as for him) she out-tanks him: she instigates booty calls, after which she sends him packing; she out-boisters, out-rowdies, and out-drinks him on their first date, at a strip club, naturally. When she throws herself at him, after calling him out for his ungentlemanly behavior, he’s suddenly torn between loyalty to Dustin and the pesky, unfamiliar tug of what might be true love. Though he’s a first class wanker when he’s on the job, he’s really a big softie, torn between Dustin and Alexis. Dustin plays his hapless role to a tee, as does Ami (Lizzi Caplan), Alexis’ you-go-girl! roommate.

Up to this point, the film is flawless. Tank’s early-asshole scenes and his soon-to-follow quandary are priceless. Likewise with Alexis’ girls-just-want-to-have-fun scenes. The film’s early promise - including the visceral thrill of Alexis yanking Tank’s chain - however, is undercut but a couple of entertaining though pointless episodes.

Homeless (it didn’t go well when Dustin caught them post-in flagrante), once again at work, Tank abuses (takes the good Christian girl to the Cheesus Crust pizzeeria) and then recants his assholedness with a client’s friend-girl, Hilary (Riki Lindhome), a high school teacher. He spills his guts about his true feelings for Alexis. With her aid, she treats Alexis to the school prom she never had (the prom itself was magical, just dramatrugically inconsequential.

The other time warp scene was the introduction of Professor Turner (Alec Baldwin). A professor of (cough, cough) Women’s Studies at a university (coeds + distinguished older man = et cetera), he’s torn further about the proper way to treat a woman. It also shows that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

He’s entertaining enough, in and of himself, but he mangles any alleged theme the movie has with a father/son talk about why his wife/Tank’s mom left him. His scam-scenes with Tank at the bar were unnecessary, not to mention a little creepy. His closing credit scene, serving as Dustin’s wingman, fell flat.

So did the final scene, set three months later after a disastrous wedding (Alexis’ sister; Tank on-purpose tanked, reverted to alpha-male behavior, but, the third time around, it wasn’t funny). Alexis’ comeuppance, in a chance encounter in a restaurant, is anti-climactic.

Superficially, it’s an entertaining film. The dialogue is snappy, like the early part of the film, whimsical, and witty. Count how many times Alexis can cram “asshole” into the same sentence (even Cartman on South Park would be flabbergasted). We learn the past tense of bang is bung. And Tank tells Drew that were he to frost his eyebrows (long story), the result would look like Frosted Mini Wheats. Tank’s deliberate crudity is a thing to behold. Likewise with Alexis’s.

But the film doesn’t hold together and thus spoils any implicit message, namely, that while beauty may be skin deep, love (read: an effective film) is something a little more profound.