TYPECAST AS a gauche virgin since his breakthrough in American Pie, here Jason Biggs plays Dustin, for whom sex is a solitary occupation he undertakes while watching his extensive porn library. He's hopelessly smitten with co-worker Alexis (Kate Hudson), but she just wants to be friends.
Dustin's so dim that he gets his flatmate Tank (charmless Dane Cook), who regards himself as a stud, to date and then drop Alexis in the hope that she will be more responsive to Dustin's advances afterwards.
His scheme goes hopelessly awry in My Best Friend's Girl, an inane and laboured effort that repeatedly resorts to coarseness for cheap laughs.
Crude sexual references trip easily off Cook's tongue, but Hudson's attempts at iconoclasm (spewing out expletives and singing along with a 2 Live Crew rap track) are embarrassing to observe. And Alec Baldwin is implausibly cast as a lecherous lecturer teaching women's studies.
This feeble yarn continues the decline of director Howard Deutsch, who started out promisingly in the mid-1980s with the John Hughes-scripted teen angst tales Pretty in Pinkand Some Kind of Wonderfulbefore drifting into forgettable sequels ( Grumpier Old Men, The Odd Couple II).
Perhaps because it's neither romantic nor comic, the movie tries to establish romantic comedy credentials through knowing references to genre antecedents such as When Harry Met Sally, which it explicitly evokes several times. Even more cringe-inducing is a dance routine (to Nena's 99 Red Balloons) that visually quotes Pulp Fiction.
No wonder the film opened here yesterday without any media previews.
Directed by Howard Deutsch. Starring Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Lizzy Caplan, Alec Baldwin 16 cert, gen release, 99 min
