My Best Friend’s Girl
Unrated Edition
Directed by Howard Deutch
Starring Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin, Diora Baird
Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Release Date: January 13, 2009

I’m going to get something off my chest that I’ve been holding onto for quite awhile: I don’t hate Dane Cook. Not totally, anyway. In the past I have found the humor in his not so subtle brand of comedy. It’s stupid, juvenile, and gets old after awhile (especially when every idiot in the country tries to quote him incessantly), but I’ve had a laugh. That being said, his movies are garbage. Mr. Brooks and Dan in Real Life were good in their own right even with his inclusion, but they worked because he was left on the sideline — which is a nice way of saying he didn’t ruin them. The problem with the movies he has headlined is that his stand up doesn’t translate to the screen at all. So even if you like his routine, the movies suck. And if you don’t, they really suck. There is an argument in that thought about him being one dimensional and unfunny and his movies being proof of that, but I don’t have the strength to discuss it. Partly because I’m not trying to defend him and partly because it doesn’t matter. The point is, as easy a target as it would be to jump on the I-wouldn’t-piss-on-Dane-Cook-if-he-were-on-fire bandwagon, any problems My Best Friend’s Girl has actually aren’t his fault. Not totally, anyway.

Tank Turner (Cook) provides a service. When guys have somehow screwed up their relationships, he is the guy they hire to date their exes. His service is that he takes these unsuspecting girls on dates and is purposely such an asshole that they are left with no choice than to run back into the arms of their former boyfriends. Call it making them look good by default. It’s a pretty good little racket and the dates make for some of the funnier moments in the movie.

In a weekend that can only be described as “lackluster,” this week’s box office winner only walks away with the prize because, I feel, no one else really bothered to turn up to the party. Lakeview Terrace came away with the prize this week, which really just explains how bad this week must have been. A movie portraying Samuel L. Jackson as an overbearing cop hassling a pair of newlyweds (that’s all I know of the movie, by the way) should not have beaten out the animated feature Igor, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

With a whopping $15.6 million, Lakeview Terrace came out on top by a pretty clear margin too, considering the next closest entry was last week’s number one, Burn After Reading, which managed only $11.3 million this week. These were the only two movies to rake in over $10 million this weekend.

Number three goes to the Dane Cook/Kate Hudson comedy My Best Friend’s Girl, which managed only $8.3 million. Sadly, it looks as if the box office take seems to match up with its reviews, taking a real hit at RT with 3 out of 10 and 4.8 out of 10 at IMDB.