Feel-bad film

It needs to be said up front: My Best Friend's Girl (rated R for strong language and sexual content) has no redeeming qualities. In an attempt to combine the romance of a chick flick with the humor of a Judd Apatow comedy, it manages neither. It is unbelievably profane, misogynistic, mundane and, most unforgivably, humorless.

The conceit of the movie is that Tank Turner (Dane Cook) is so good at being a jerk that men who have lost their girlfriends by being jerks themselves pay him to treat the women even worse, thereby driving them back to their loser boyfriends. It's the feel-bad hit of the season.

And that's before Tank's best friend and roommate Dustin (Jason Biggs) arranges for Tank to work his magic on Alexis (former Academy Award nominee Kate Hudson whose slumming here is fairly convincing proof she's taken leave of her senses), the woman he'd been casually seeing before she demoted him to friend.

But it turns out Alexis rivals Tank in the raunchiness game and is unmoved by his "worst-date-ever" shtick. She's decided she's no longer interested in a relationship and instead wants casual, meaningless sex. So the two fall for each other, in a very casual, meaningless way, leading to all sorts of boring confrontations.

It's hard to care about any of the characters in the love triangle as they joke about killing unborn children, one-night stands, and degrading the opposite sex as much as possible.

The movie is so bad that even Alec Baldwin playing the small part of Tank's philandering father isn't enough to brighten the comedy. One wonders whether Dane Cook angered the make-up artists, too, because his face has never looked more craggy, pock-marked, or gray. But the best make-up in the world won't conceal the fact that Cook is still his unfunny, charmless self in yet another movie.