My Best Friend’s Girl Blu-ray review

For some reason, I’ve missed out on Dane Cook thus far in my cinematic viewing, and My Best Friend’s Girl was thus my first chance to meet him. I’m not in a hurry to do so again.

As the lead character in My Best Friend’s Girl, he plays the kind of friend that nobody really wants to have. He steals your partner, ruins weddings and generally crashes through the film in a charmless way, giving a performance that’s really quite hard to warm to. Given that this is the first time I’ve seen the man in action, I can’t comment on whether it’s him or the material that’s at fault here, but either way, the film around him absolutely stinks as well.

I usually have a soft spot for raucous comedies, but there are all sorts of problems here. Firstly, the plot. The idea is that Cook plays Tank, a man whose place in the world is to take woman on dates from hell, so that they can then see just how good they’ve got things with their ex, or something like that. Things go wrong though when he tries to help out his mate, played by Jason Biggs (and just why is he pissing his career away?), who wants to take his relationship with Kate Hudson’s nauseating Alexis to the next stage. She’s reluctant, and it’s up to Tank to get things sorted.

It won’t come as much of a revelation to learn that Tank goes through a bit of a character change by the end of the film, but the journey there is so laboured, so unfunny and so unlikeable that it’s impossible to care. Even a cameo from Alec Baldwin can’t come to the rescue, and with just a mild titter or two to be had, My Best Friend’s Girl starts sinking without trace. A pity, because there are people involved here who can surely do better.

The Blu-ray transfer seemed quite soft in places to me, but then there are moments too when the 1080p benefits shine through. The audio’s not too bad either, but this isn’t the kind of film that demands anything spectacular in that department, and it doesn’t get it, either.

Which leaves the extras package, which is where the disc is redeemed slightly. There’s a pair of commentaries for starters, one from director Howard Deutch. Yep, the same Howard Deutch behind She’s Having A Baby and Pretty In Pink. It’s a fairly dry listen, and is easily bettered by track two, which features the writer, the producer and Jason Biggs. A generous but unspectacular collection of featurettes round the disc out.

It’s not a bad collection of supplements, to be fair, but you can’t help but feel it’s all a bit wasted. Because, ultimately, they’re little more than compensation for sitting through the piss-poor main feature in the first place. Utterly missable.

The film:

The disc: