‘Girl’ tanks, thanks to perverse best friend, Tank
Our Rating: 
Whatever happened to Kate Hudson?
She burst onto the scene in “Almost Famous,” one of the best films of the decade, then disappeared into a sea of bad romantic comedies; earlier this year even she put out a turgid romcom under the name of “Fool’s Gold.”
Half a year later, she finds herself in yet another waste of time.
This time around, Hudson is the subject of “My Best Friend’s Girl,” the center of attention between Dustin (Jason Biggs) and Dustin’s cousin and — wait for it — best friend, Tank, played by the insufferable Dane Cook.
Tank is a perverse sort of relationship therapist: when a woman dumps her boyfriend, said lovelorn schmuck pays Tank to take his lost love on the date from hell.
Tank blares offensive music, smokes constantly, vocally expects sex and just generally acts like a pig.
After subjecting the poor girl to such abuse, she runs crying into the arms of the ex-boyfriend who suddenly doesn’t look so bad.
Tank finds himself in quite the moral quandary when his BFF Dustin gets dumped after confessing his love to Alexis (Hudson) after only five weeks of dating.
Dustin, firmly convinced she is “the one,” hires Tank to win her back.
Of course, the strict rules of romantic comedy stipulate the girl must then fall for the jerk, and the monkey wrench has been thrown.
Tank pulls all the stops to disgust Alexis, but soon he himself falls for her, and the cliché train keeps a-rollin’.
Almost nothing about this film works.
A good romantic comedy requires at least a hint of chemistry, and no one in this film is a match for the other.
To be fair, that’s incredibly difficult when the characters are so inconsistent.
Tank is a callous womanizer, but he shows from the start shades of the hopeless romantic.
Dustin thinks Alexis is certifiably his soulmate, and yet they’ve been dating so briefly that she obviously never even met his roommate/cousin/best friend Tank.
Alexis is the worst of all.
She dumps Dustin for wanting a serious relationship, but cannot commit to suddenly looking for a slew of one-night stands because she’s a “serial monogamist.”
Then why the hell did you break up with the person who only had eyes for you?
Granted, he was taking things fast, but just set some ground rules; don’t dump him if he’s the kind of man you want.
Then she gets a few drinks in her and loses all inhibitions for the rest of the film.
It’s not entirely unpleasant; however, the supporting cast is quite good. Alec Baldwin plays the philandering father of Tank, and he brings all that comic brilliance he displays on “30 Rock” to the role.
The character is too one-note, but he elevates it into the only genuinely funny person in the whole two hours.
Alexis’ roommate is played by Lizzy Caplan, who was far and away the only interesting person in Cloverfield, and her sex-toy obsessions and frank dialogue make her intriguing, if not necessarily funny.
Unfortunately, the writing hampers even the good actors, and the plot is ludicrous.
The ending in particular is so bad it threatens to open a black hole of comedy in the theater, compressing all humor to a single dot before crushing it into nothingness.
Most interesting is how many parallels the film draws with its lead Dane Cook.
Cook/Tank spouts inane non-sequiturs comprised of jokes that reached their expiration date 10 years ago and were only funny to emotionally stunted high schoolers in the first place.
He spits out these streams of unfunny venom at light speed, as if he’s desperately trying to outrun the fact that he is where humor goes to die.
Despite being a self-centered jerk, Tank gets women the same way Cook inexplicably has fans.
Both make the mistake of believing themselves edgy for using profanity, when in reality they’re about 30 years too late for naughty words to really shock.
Everything you need to know about either the film or Dane Cook occurs at the beginning of the film.
During the opening credits, he slowly walks through a bar full of his clients, all of them wearing the same clothes and with the same idiot hairstyles.
As a smirking Cook wades among them, I imagined the heavens parting and two cherubs wearing gold chains and smelling of body spray descending with fanfare to proclaim “All hail Dane, king of jerks.”
