My Best Friend's Girl (2008)

Howard Deutch's My Best Friend's Girl arrives from 2008, a year when the romantic comedy still operated under the assumption that a man behaving badly was its own reward. Tank, a call-center operator, runs a side business taking women on deliberately catastrophic dates so they will return, chastened and grateful, to the boyfriends who hired him. Dane Cook plays him with a leer that never settles into charm. The film's engine is a single crude premise, and it runs that premise into the ground with a diligence bordering on the admirable. No larger argument is being made. No thesis about how we ought to live. Just a man, a woman, and a great deal of wine thrown in a restaurant.

What the film does not do is instructive. It does not pause to consider the women it parades through strip clubs, weddings, and disappointing evenings, nor does it imagine that anyone in the audience might wish it to. Kate Hudson's Alexis is a prize to be won, passed between two men like a relay baton. The humor is aimed at bodies, at appetites, at the mild humiliation of the insufficiently confident. Alec Baldwin appears as the hero's father and dispenses wisdom of the vaguest, most self-serving kind. Nobody learns anything worth the runtime, and nobody is asked to.

This is a film with no message to deliver and no congregation to deliver it to. It leers where it could be earnest, and it never lectures, which is its single consistent virtue. We classify it accordingly. A relic of a less self-aware era, or perhaps simply a picture that had nothing on its mind. Either way it sits comfortably at the bottom of the register, unbothered and unimproving.