The premise is tried and true, a guy falls for his friend's ex-girlfriend and drama ensues, I have a soft-spot for stories like this. I think most everyone does because so many people have been in similar predicaments. Love is complicated and it's cathartic to watch a movie with a similar premise to something you've experienced but have it end happily. That is the charm of rom coms and why I love them so much.
I read the description, thought it seemed harmless enough and saw the names Biggs and Hudson so I was like, sounds interesting enough and clicked. I should have paid closer attention to the cover art because we are immediately introduced to a guy being unnecessarily awful to a girl, like catastrophically awful to her and expecting sex. I believe he propositioned her, she slammed the door in his face, he looked frustrated and then said: "No, I'm not done, I'm not done." He then knocks on her door and demands to know why she's not putting out and we're then treated to a flashback of how horrific their date was. Honestly, I wanted to turn the movie off because not only was this guy awful but I realized that he was supposed to be our main character and to top it off, he was played by Dane Cook.
Remember Dane Cook? He was typecast as an asshole because he's really good at playing assholes. I'm also told he's a comedian but I seriously doubt that because I've seen one of his specials and you can see his punch lines coming from a mile away and it takes ages to get there so you're just pissed by the time he finally says them.
I don't know why I slogged it out, I think I was equal parts horrified and fascinated by the movie. I could not compute in my head how they were going to redeem this irredeemable asshole and make us want him with his friend's girl so I had to keep watching. I guess I have to give the movie that much credit, I kept watching it.
Dane's character (Tank) goes to a bar, where he gets paid by this asshole guy because of course, he was just paid to be that much of a dick. On top of that, he's paid to be a dick to manipulate girls into thinking their awful ex was not, in fact, that awful and that is a level of manipulative bullshit that is honestly hard to stomach. I think the writer thought that since it was just Tank's sort of job, it excused his behaviour.
Narrator voice: It did not.
They also try to make him seem like he's "not that bad" by having the guy who hired him to treat his ex poorly so she'd take him back to then go off to have sex with another girl and he calls him out for it. No, writer, Tank is still an asshole in this scenario, just maybe only slightly less of an asshole than the rando guy.
Side note: Is anyone else tired of the trope where a smooth, player asshole strides confidently through a bar and literally every single girl is eyeing him like they want to fuck him on the spot because he's just so darn attractive when that literally never happens in real life? Also, it is really, extremely difficult to buy this idea, even in fantasy/movieland context, when the guy women are supposedly swooning over looks like this:
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| No thank you, please |
He's not ugly per se, (the character's personality sure is), it's just he's really, really average looking. He's not the type of guy that's going to turn that many heads and get girls to make sexy eyes at, is all I'm saying. Also, he's Dane Cook.
So, how does the movie go about making Dane Cook look more palatable? Cast Jason Biggs as the titular "Best Friend". This sounds weird because Biggs is usually pretty likable and can be cute in a dorky way but have no fear, this movie's writer is on the case! Biggs is introduced as a hapless, overly moony loser type who is inexplicably dating(?) Kate Hudson's character. He wants to tell her he loves her and decides that night is when he'll do it. He takes her out for steaks and she's impressed and grateful because apparently he's a vegan. This serves to let us know that he is the wrong choice for her but also...it lays the seeds for something that I really loathe.
So, I asked before, how do we make Dane Cook look good after introducing him so horrifyingly and the answer to that, Dear Readers, is to make everyone awful. Literally. Everyone. Kate's character, Alexis, is horrified that Jason Biggs' character, Dustin, has said the big L word to her and complains that they've only been "seeing each other" for 5 weeks. Clearly there was a miscommunication over how serious this relationship would be and she dumps his ass. This wouldn't normally bug me but she's kind of awful in the way she dumps him but then I can't feel bad for Dustin because my worst fears began pinging in this scene and later on were confirmed, he's a NiceGuyTM.
Immediately after the break up, Dustin starts whining about how awesome he is and how she just doesn't understand how good she had it with him and I want to gag. To make things worse, Alexis is asking her friend what is wrong with her because Dustin is such a great guy and this is when I looked up the writer. Yes, it's written by a man because of course he'd view girls talking this way, where they know that they dumped a "good guy" but they just can't help themselves because they want to go out and have fun. THIS IS NOT HOW MOST WOMEN THINK!! I hated everything about the way Alexis was portrayed, she's clearly meant to be "the dream girl" and thus can't be into girly things. She likes steaks and rap music and is just so #NotLikeOtherGirls.
I actually sympathized with Alexis because her choices in this movie were between a giant asshole and a NiceGuyTM and I couldn't see how this could end well for her. But the writer decided to make her kind of awful because he clearly has issues concerning the Asshole/NiceGuyTM trope. I can't say this diffinitively but I feel it in my heart that this writer definitely sees himself as a NiceGuyTM and some girl definitely dumped him for someone he believed was an "asshole" and this was his bizarre way of getting back at her. Change my mind.
Obviously, she goes for Dane Cook and she shows up super drunk to their date which I did not understand at all. I get that she wanted to date more and have some fun but that's super rude of her to show up completely plastered to a date with a guy who hadn't even shown his asshole side to her yet. I think it was the only way they could think of to get her to overlook his obnoxious bad date routine and want to see him again. Since she's #NotLikeOtherGirls, Tank falls for her and he goes to seek out advice from his father.
His father is Alec Baldwin and he's a professor and of course, all the girls want to bang him and he's also an obnoxious asshole about it. I hated everything about his scenes. They were crass, gross, mean-spirited trash where he openly brags about banging his very young TAs and treats them like crap. This is, of course, used as a way to make Tank seem more sympathetic or at least, they hoped it would make him more sympathetic.
Narrator voice: It did not.
Any good will that it might have cultivated with people is demolished by the time we get to the big wedding scene. Remember the girl from the beginning of the movie? She's Alexis' sister and she's getting married to the mega douche who hired Tank to manipulate her into taking him back. Strike 3 automatic right there but it gets worse. Tank has a "change of...heart(?)" about being good for her or betraying his friend or whatever. So he decides to do what Dustin paid him to do and becomes the biggest asshole to ever asshole. There's a "cute" countdown list of incidents he does at the wedding too. He gets hammered, he ruins the wedding cake, among other things and most egregiously he propositions her mother for a blow job and pulls his pants down to flash her. Yeah, that's not a strike out, that's not second chance material, this relationship has been utterly nuked.
Naturally, this is just the third act break up and now Dustin is completely on Tank's side because "if he was willing to do all that to her, he must love her."
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| Giant red flags. Dump his ass and get a restraining order |
But obviously, she takes him back after they both behave like assholes to each other in a "cute" make up scene, end movie.
I hated everything about watching this but it was like this horrible, ugly, bloody, train wreck that I just couldn't look away from. That said, now that my morbid curiosity about how this piece of shit would play out is satisfied, I will not ever have the desire to sit through this thing again. It was unpleasant, unfunny, and just plain mean. Like Swiped, before it (which was surprisingly written by a woman) you get the sense that the writer just seems to hate everyone and has a very jaded look of the way people behave. It reduces people into stereotypes and breeds really negative thinking about the dating world.
This was clearly trying to follow the mid to late 2000s trend of "guy rom coms" that got weirdly popular because of movies like American Pie and Wedding Crashers. Basically, they wanted to bring in more people or make "chick flicks" more guy-friendly so they could make more profit. I always found the sentiment of bro-y rom coms to be troublesome, as if guys can't or shouldn't appreciate a really well told love story unless there's assholes/drinking/and bewbs for them to ogle while being subjected to it. It feels kind of gross but maybe that's just me. There are some of these types that I actually do enjoy but there needs to be some kind of heart to them to make them work. This one feels like it went way too far over the line of being bro-friendly and a rom com because the guys they're appealing to with this would probably hate that he got "whipped" by the girl and people who like rom coms would probably not be satisfied by the ending either because the entire movie and everyone in it are hard to relate to or like. I don't even mind some brom coms but this movie has absolutely no heart. There is nothing charming about this movie, even less funny about it, and everyone in it is better than this movie/
Except Dane Cook. He sucks.
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