Dir. Howard Deutch, US, 2008, 100 mins
Cast: Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Dane Cook
Review by Carol Allen
This film is an uncomfortable and somewhat charmless cross between gross out and romantic comedy, which not even the delightful Kate Hudson can make work.
Hudson plays Alexis, a successful lawyer, who is tired of monogamous relationships and just wants casual sex. After a few dates with Dustin (Briggs), he starts coming on too strong for her taste and she dumps him. However, Dustin has a best mate Tank (Cook), who is a total slob, but a master at both seducing and offending women, a talent he’s turned into a lucrative sideline. For a consideration, he’ll take someone’s ex out on what will be the worst date of her life, so she’ll go running back to the original boyfriend thinking she didn’t know when she was lucky. That’s the plan when Dustin hires Tank to do what he does so well, but yes, you’ve guessed it, things don’t go according to plan and Alexis and Tank start to fall for each other.
Alexis comes over as a somewhat bizarre mixture of goody-goody prig and a bit of a slapper. Her more openly wanton flat mate Ami (Lizzy Caplan) appears to be a potentially far more interesting character, but she isn’t given very much to do. Dustin is a bit of a thankless and sidelined role for Biggs, who strikes one as a totally wet wally, though there is an end credits sequence, which somewhat redeems the character, to the extent that one is tempted to wonder if he had that written into his contract before accepting the part. The real action is with Tank, who is the most charmless of the lot. The film’s efforts to redeem him towards the end and convince us that his relationship with Alexis is true romance, are too little too late and not helped by the total absence of any overpowering sexual chemistry between them, which is what we’re supposed to believe brings them together. The fact that the main characters all look 30-something, while behaving like emotionally stunted teenagers, also doesn’t help us to warm to them.
To be fair though there are some very funny moments, even for Briggs, as in one sequence where he accidentally loses those expressive eyebrows of his and looks like a totally different person. And the first date between Alexis and Tank, when he takes her to a strip club and she’s so drunk that rather than being offended she enjoys herself and starts tucking dollar bills into the strippers’ knickers like all the men, is a good laugh, as is another scene where Tank, who teaches training sessions at a call centre, finds himself taking a sexy phone call from her in front of his class. But most of the comedy relies too heavily on crudity and lacks wit, perception and inventiveness. There’s a neat cameo from Alec Baldwin as Tank’s middle-aged sleazebag father, but it’s difficult to buy into the film’s simplistic suggestion that he is the reason for Tank’s emotional immaturity. This is not a terrible film. It’s just not very funny. And the under 25s, who’ve been brought up on gross out films, may find it a touch tame for their taste.
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