It Really is That Fucking Bad

Posted 02:19 (GMT) 14th December 2008 by David J. Bishop

Oh God oh God oh God. Where do I start? Where do I start? Sometimes big things happen in your life, enormous events. Moments, experiences which are so massive as to transcend our conceptions of size and significance. Everything seems comparatively petty and, well, trivial. And as a writer I struggle to find the words sometimes. This is one of those times. I have passed through an event that is at once mind-shatteringly horrifying and epic in its scope and I am utterly lost for words. It has digested me and left me a dry husk of the man I once was.

Yes, My Best Friend's Girl is that bad. I don't hesitate to call it one of the worst films ever made. Not just bad by the standards of modern-day mainstream cinema. I mean it's up there with Batman and Robin, Catwoman, Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and fucking Gigli. Ed Wood would have washed his hands of this turd. We know that during the film-making process there are checks in place, that greedy suit-wearing executives oversee the proceedings to bottom-line things and make sure that the project earns money. Yes, these men are soulless douche-bags who stifle the creative process but they also stifle the kind of insanity that led to Bride of the Monster and Manos: The Hands of Fate. So when we describe a film as 'awful' or 'terrible' what we really mean to say is that it's mediocre or lacking imaginative spark. But sometimes even in this environment the impossible happens: a genuine B-movie falls into your lap, a film so bad that it becomes painful to watch. My Best Friend's Girl is just such a film.

For a start, this film is ugly. It's dark and grainy and contains far too many close-ups of Dane Cook's grizzled face. Was that too harsh? How can I explain the revulsion I felt towards Dane Cook's screen presence during this film? I mean, this man is considered handsome by some I have no doubt. It's just that here in the world of My Best Friend's Girl he looks tired and drawn, like he hasn't slept in three days. Also he is supposed to look like a tough guy or a dangerous bad boy or something - which manifests itself as not shaving, wearing obscene shirts, smoking, getting his cock out in public and generally looking and acting like a crazy homeless man. A certain special someone I saw the film with (my girlfriend Katie who is also my girlfriend!) thought he looked like an ape. I understand where she's coming from, having recently re-read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ape-like Mr Hyde is described as inspiring a "haunting sense of unexpressed deformity" in all who see him. That's the vibe I got of Dane Cook. So, yeah, too many close-ups of that, whatever the fuck it was.

Second of all there is no plot. The premise is that the stupidly-named Dusty has broken up with his girlfriend Alexis so he hires the improbably-named Tank to take her out on a date and show her such a shitty time that she runs back into Dusty's manipulative unlikable arms. Tank, as it happens, is a professional bastard who does this a lot - men hire him to give their ex-girlfriends a little perspective by pretending to be a horrible person. After a night of what amounts to psychological torture they come running back to their relatively lovable guys. It's called a Tanking. Did you see what they did there? If you laughed out loud at that and slapped your thigh with mirth then you will absolutely love this film, or you would have done if I hadn't just spoilt the best joke in the whole God-damn picture. For reals, that's the best they've got. We never find out what the boyfriends who commission their Tankings did to be dumped in the first place but if I had to guess I would say war crimes, maybe selling drugs to primary school children, because Tank's treatment of these women is appalling - aside from whipping out his knob in a restaurant he also feeds them dogs without them knowing, deliberately vomits all over the floor, angrily shouts at an imaginary ex-girlfriend about getting her and her sister pregnant. Disgusting, extreme shit. Not subtle. It's not really played for laughs that much, either. We don't get to see Tank do that much Tanking and when he does it's just stomach-churning. Watching one person abuse another is only funny when it's surprisingly clever or cleverly surprising (watching a man vomit is predictably stupid) and when we don't sympathise with the victim.

But no satirical lens is applied to the woman we see Tank mistreat (I couldn't bring myself to type "we see Tank Tank"). We don't hate her, we just hate him. It's like watching a home video made of a school bully beating the crap out of someone who reminds you of yourself at that age - your sympathies are going to lie with the victim. This isn't Bill fucking Murray in Groundhog Day misanthropically railing against a bland and stupid world prior to some heart-warming and therefore equally entertaining moment of redemption, this is just Dane Cook being paid to be obnoxious - both within the film and in real life, if you think about it. The Tankings - the only imaginable draw of the film - are aggressively, perversely unfunny. Yet they wheel Tank out as if we're supposed to get goosebumps when he's on screen, like we're rubbing our hands together with anticipation at the prospect of guaranteed comedy gold. Barney Stinson he ain't - when he isn't relentlessly making your fists itch with a hatred that threatens to burn through the screen and into the wall behind Tank is just boring.

Forgive me if I have given you the impression that Tank is a one-dimensional character. Within the first five minutes of the film we find out that actually Tank cares about the couples he is helping to reconcile and is frustrated by the relentless douchebaggery of the men he helps out in such an underhanded and mercenary way. He's an asshole with a heart of gold! This is what I mean when I say there is no plot - what should be a 90-odd-minute arc of characterisation and exploration is thrust into our faces before the opening credits finish rolling. It seems the writer was so terrified that we might miss this kinder, gentler side of Tank that he broadcasts it right at the start. We see him crying watching Ghost in, like, the very next scene. The writer takes us for even bigger idiots than he is, which we are not.

Yeah, so if you've watched the trailer you know that Tank takes Alexis out at Dusty's behest but instead of scaring her away he fucks her. Then they keep fucking. Will Dusty ever find out? Will Alexis and Tank consider that their feelings for each other might run deeper than just sexual attraction? God, if you can't guess should I just say it? When you tell people about a film they haven't seen you either just tell them the set-up for the main drama or you tell them what happens for, say, the first half of the film. Anything beyond that is spoiler country, right? Right, so on that basis I can tell you that yes Dusty does find out that Tank and Alexis have been doing each other. The drama reaches its crisis-point when Dusty storms into Alexis' house and sees Tank carrying her down the stairs... you know, in a meaningless fuck-buddy kind of way. This is the big twist right, when the whole deception that initially fuelled our story comes crashing down and everyone falls out, the end of Act Two in the Three Act Structure? No. I checked my watch. Only about half an hour had passed. This is the 'Tank is an asshole with a heart of gold' thing all over again. That kind of dramatic tension needs building up and exploring and - in what is supposed to be a comedy - exploiting for comedic value. Shit, take your time people, we have all night! Be subtle, seduce me. Yeah, so after about half an hour the film runs out of plot. It's the narrative equivalent of premature ejaculation.

What follows is a two-hour meander to nowhere in particular. People do things - we don't know why. Tank goes to see his dad but it turns out his dad is

a) Alec Baldwin and

b) An even bigger douche than Tank, only without the heart of gold.

Again, we don't know why Tank's dad behaves this way. We don't even know why Tank is visiting his Dad - is it for advice? He doesn't get any and nor does he need any, he already knows how he feels about Alexis - he tells his father as much. You get the feeling that everyone is just wandering around killing time. If I was sitting with a screenplay like this spread out in front of me this would be when I would pick up a pair of scissors. Alec Baldwin's character? Completely irrelevant to the plot. He can go. The last forty five minutes of the film? Bye-bye. But then where do you stop? Once you realise how much of the story is irrelevant to the plot it soon becomes clear that almost everything is irrelevant to the plot. Basically, there is no plot.

God, there's nothing worse than realising within the first forty minutes of a film that there is actually no plot, that what you are watching is a badly stitched together patchwork of beats the writer saw in other, better films. He saw that they worked, he didn't realise exactly why but he knew he wanted to do something similar. It's kind of like watching the musical episode of Buffy, except instead of spontaneous show tunes the characters keep stumbling into hollow facsimiles of romantic comedy tropes. The meet cute, the argument, the running through the rain to tell somebody something important, the hero overhearing a home truth, the man falling down - they're all there just without any sense of timing, story-telling, heart or really any fucking reason to be there at all. These are separate chunks from better stories, stolen, cut up and then cack-handedly sewn up into a single creature, a lumbering abomination with two many arms and not enough eyes, by idiots. Watching this twisted, wretched thing, this shallow and mindless mockery of life - the narrative of My Best Friend's Girl - lumbering towards a conclusion is frustrating. It's like we all know where the door is but the wretched monster is too stupid to figure it out, so you have to just watch it walk into all the walls before it finally lucks and out stumbles to the exit and you're left thinking that it could have got there a whole lot sooner.

Thirdly, there is no script. I'm not sure who to blame for that one, more on that in a second. The dialogue, such as it is, consistently does what every novice writer is told not to do. Dialogue is not there to advance the plot. It is not there to deliver exposition. In a film you provide that information visually because cinema is a visual medium. It's the old, slightly confusing adage of 'show don't tell'. The script in My Best Friend's Girl teeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllssssssss. Fuck. Me. Hard. It tells so much. You will not believe how much it tells.

Like, "After all, we are cousins." "Yes, but not blood-related." Who the fuck says that? Or "How was your three month leave of absence from work?" (This is how we find out that three months have passed. What, did they lose part of the film? I mean, later on when another three months have passed it comes up with text saying 'Three Months Later') "Thank you for coming with me to this shop where we are buying a dress for my sister's wedding next week." How about a character doing something confusing followed by a fifteen minutes scene in which another character interrogates them about why they did it. Say Tank fucks a dog and then pushes a clown out of a window and into a bath full of snakes. That never happens in the film, it's just an example. I made this whole thing sound too entertaining, now. It's so hard to think of things you would never want to see, the kind of things you see in this film. I would actually pay good money to see Dane Cook fuck a dog and push a clown out of a window, into a bath full of snakes. So let's say he does this. Then we're treated to a lengthy Q and A which goes a-little something a-like a-this:

Alexis: Why did you fuck that dog?

Tank: Because I heard you say something before and I freaked out.

Alexis: Well, why did you push that clown out of the window?

Tank: He said something unkind about you that no-one could hear but me, not even the audience.

Alexis: Okay, so why snakes?

Tank: Because my father Alec Baldwin told me to put snakes there.

Alexis: Wow, this would have been some useful information to deliver beforehand so the audience knew how to feel about what was going on at the time. Why withhold this stuff for no reason except to be annoying but show you crying watching Ghost right at the start?

You get the idea. This is the role of about 90% of the dialogue in My Best Friend's Girl - to deliver some clunky exposition at just the time we need it least. The rest of the time it's just telling us how we're supposed to feel about characters. Stuff like "You're a good guy," "You're my best friend," "Dad, I've met this girl and she's smart and fun and strong-willed," and "You are pretty smart." We never see these people do any of those things, they never demonstrate any of these characteristics up there on the screen. Here's what we do see of the characters: Dusty? Annoying. That is his only character trait. Alexis? She's an even bigger penis than Tank because she, like Alec Baldwin, has no heart at all. She's just a bitch. I'll put that down to Kate Hudson's utter inability to portray a human being convincingly. Tank? A fucking bastard who I want to die, no matter how hard he cries watching Ghost. Need I remind you that Hitler was a fan of Charlie Chaplin films? It doesn't suddenly make me sympathise with Nazi politics (and yes I employed the Reductio Ad Hitlerum, this is a Dane Cook movie for Christ's sake and I needed a powerful psychological shorthand, human language is only capable of conveying so much). This kind of "Alexis is smart", "Dusty is a good guy" horse shit is what we call an informed characteristic. The writer decided that this person would be, say, paranoid but had no idea how to demonstrate paranoia so instead everyone talks about how paranoid they are. Constantly.

The writer even keeps telling us what to think about Tank after we've already seen him being an asshole. Everyone keeps telling Tank that he is an asshole. Let's not be coy here - the writer is very self-consciously telling us that he is an asshole. In precisely those words. Over an over again. About 15 times. I lost count of the number of times he is described as an asshole. He even describes himself as an asshole. Not bastard, prick, jerk, wanker, toss-pot, douche-nozzle, cock, penis, ass, jackass, asshat, shit, toe-rag, blackguard, fucktard, rogue, knave, anus, oaf, git, knobhead, fucker, shit-fucker, mother-fucker, bitch or dick-head. Just asshole. Am I supposed to believe that a professional writer couldn't think of any synonyms for the word 'asshole'? Come on! If you doubted me up until now, you must doubt no more. We have to be in B-movie territory with that point alone. I haven't seen Santa Claus Conquers The Martians but I can imagine that even the writer of that sorry mess had access to a thesaurus. Check this shit out - it's a free online thesaurus! All you need to do is own a computer or know someone who owns a computer, or failing that all you need to do is to have opened a book in your life or to have met a human being. Instead it's: "You're an asshole," "Leave me alone, asshole!" "What an asshole," "I'm an asshole," and even, I shit you not, "We get it already! You're an asshole!" That last one is an exact quotation from the film. Uh... asshole.

This wasn't just a problem on a word level or an overall plot level. Individual scenes just sort of ended halfway through. No beginning, middle or end just an in media res opening a sprawling middle and then nothing. The scenes slowly grind to a halt as the actors run out of words to say. The actors just sort of stand there, dumbfounded. They have been in enough films to recognise that the tensions and emotions their characters are supposed to be feeling have not reached any kind of resolution. So they sort of gurn at each other and flail their arms, desperately trying to communicate the rest of the scene through pantomime alone. This doesn't just happen once, it happens throughout the vast majority of the film.

After Dusty has found out what Tank has been up to (the first time) he confronts him about it and says: "Do you have anything to say for yourself?" and instead of words we get a pregnant silence in which Dane Cook tries to communicate as much as he can with no fucking words to say - it's like the film-makers are walking on camera and saying "Sorry, folks! We didn't write any dialogue for this part either!" That kind of fucking thing happens all the way though.

In the cinema I was in a state of despair. It has always been a dream of mine to be a professional writer - and here was a guy who had lived my dream and who didn't deserve it. This was the worst writing I had ever heard. I thought my ears would start to bleed. Here was a man who had no idea how human interaction worked, how story-telling, scene structure, character or love itself worked. Here was a man who did not even know that there is more than one way to say 'asshole'.

I went onto IMDB to look this guy up. Jordan Cahan. I will remember that name for the rest of my life just so I can despise it. I didn't spot it in the credits. Maybe that's because they took his shitty little script and abandoned it. IMDB informs me that the director encouraged the cast to improvise their lines, sometimes deviating from huge chunks of the script. Well, fuck. What am I supposed to think now? Whose fault is this God-awful film? Is that terrible line of dialogue the invention of Jordan Cahan or Kate Hudson? I got the feeling throughout that whoever wrote this sack of vomit was not actually a writer. Well, Kate Hudson is definitely not a writer so this makes a lot of sense to me. But how far did the madness reach? Did the director just approach Hudson and Cook and tell them, "Okay, in this scene Tank is an asshole and Alexis is drunk," followed by a series of plot points? Is that why the dialogue always consisted of "You're an asshole!" "Well, you're drunk!" followed by the characters just explaining the plot point by point?

What the fuck are they doing ad-libbing anyway? What's wrong with having a script? I mean, sure there's no script in real life but I thought we had abandoned realism when the professional sociopath with a heart of gold falling for His Best Friend's Girl first made his hateful appearance. This whole scenario is intensely stagy and artificial - that's not necessarily to the detriment of the thing. Real life is largely boring and uneventful - our minds just switch off for those bits. Seeing those bits writ large (or not writ at all as it were) before our eyes just emphasises the boredom. The role of good writing - and art as a whole - is not to reproduce reality exactly but to represent it in such a way as to convince us that it is real whilst at the same time entertaining us. By asking Kate Hudson and Dane Cook to make up their own words the director is just asking them to write the script, as they go along. And it turns out that they're shitty writers. Deeply shitty.

Hell, I'm terrible at improv. I like to sit and take my time, think of the best words in the best possible order and then rewrite and edit the result until it is polished and funny. BECAUSE I'M A WRITER! If you grabbed me in the street and said: "be funny" I would fall apart. Perhaps accomplished, intelligent actors like Stephen Fry or Ian McKellen - people who are witty, quick on their feet and who could have been or are writers as well as actors - could have thought up comedy gold on the spot but those people are not Kate Hudson, Dane Cook or Jason 'American Pie' Biggs. In retrospect the film's arduous attempts to get to the end of a scene with all the drama sorted out and ultimately to shuffle to the end of the film shambolically tripping over as many rom-com clichés as possible were perhaps more the result of mediocre performers being over-estimated by an imbecilic director than an incompetent writer.Then I think to myself, how bad must the original script have been for this to have been the more favourable alternative? Even with a more imaginative cast I don't think gritty realism is really something anyone wants from a romantic comedy. This isn't the Blair Witch Project for fuck's sake.

At one point I turned to Katie and said: "How do you make a film? Step one, you start with a script. What's wrong with these people?" Out of the entire film-making process the cheapest part has to be the writing. How much more would they have had to spend for a polished, well-written screenplay? Not a screenplay written by someone with brain damage, not a screenplay you have to write on the spot with ill-equipped and uncomfortable actors. A real screenplay. I would have done it for free, if only to save the world from My Best Friend's Girl.

After n number of false endings, pseudo-endings and plot threads running out of tension and momentum literally hours before the credits were set to roll, after all this, it faded to black and we got the words: 'Three Months Later'. I slumped all the way down in my seat and sobbed a little. Another ending? How long do they have to drag the ordeal out before it becomes sadistic in its pointlessness? Why not just have Dane Cook hum tunelessly directly into the camera for fifteen straight minutes? I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't know who was doing this to me but I wanted to scream at them, "Do it to Julia!". Three. Months. Later. You know, forget the fact that the film has already jumped forwards in time and only told us through clunky and obscure dialogue through which only a person paying close attention could quickly piece together that months have passed since the last scene. Forget all that - this time you get to find out that three months have passed. Not two months, not four. Three. Because this story could not possibly be resolved in a shorter timeframe. It's such a slap in the face because the film really could have ended after just half an hour. Actually, you could have ended it after the first five. I'd go with the latter, because it is shorter.

Even after the credits roll there's still a slew of questions left unanswered. Like, what exactly is the function of Alec Baldwin's character? Seriously, did he just wander onto the set that day and you thought why the fuck not? If Tank really is such an asshole then why does everyone at his place of work love him? Those fuckers are lining up to give him high fives. And why do all the ladies love him? There's an implication that hot girls - apparently ones with bags of self-esteem - would like nothing more than to jump his grizzly bones. If being a unlikable wanker is such a turn-on, surely that negates the whole fucking premise of this film, that all women prior to Alexis have reacted badly to Tank's behaviour? Plot holes? As we've established already, this is just one big hole - a vacuum - with tattered things that perhaps to a fevered imagination could be described as plotesque floating around in this cold gulf.

There is a small scene after the credits which answers one question - what happens to the two characters I cared the least about in what amounts to a veritable conga line of one-dimensional puppets I didn't give a solitary shit about. What happens to these two people I won't name because of spoilers? They are paired off. It seems arbitrary, since they only have one character trait in common but actually both characters have only one character trait (besides being annoying, a universal characteristic in this film) so maybe this counts as true love in the world of My Best Friend's Girl. Of course, I already knew what would happen to those characters. As soon as the second of the two was introduced Katie leaned over to me and said "They're going to pair her and that other guy up at the end. You wait and see." And as soon as she pointed that out it became blatantly clear not only that she was right but also that because she was right, because we were watching a film so ham-fisted in its storytelling that you can predict everything about the end after fifteen minutes, because of this we both knew precisely what calibre of film we were up against. We should have just walked out at that point but now we were invested - we had to see if she was right. And she was. I should just tell you the spoiler - the film spoils itself by flagging up everything which will come into play later, like a stripper showing you a photo of her tits before the show begins.

Katie and I played a game of Predict the Next Plot Point all the way through. We also amused ourselves by comparing Dane Cook's face with that of a chimp and with an elaborate in-joke in which Kate Hudson's character is played by one of the hobbes from the excellent Fable II. You see, I forgot Kate Hudson's name in a conversation we were having about seeing the shitty film. I called her Kate Hobson. Which logically led us to think how funny it would be if Kate Hudson was a hobbe, a vicious goblin-like creature with sharp teeth and a vicious but child-like mentality, and how it would probably make for a much better film than the one we were about to see. And we were right. A typical exchange between Tank and the hobbe Alexis would be:

Tank: I would kick you in the ass, but my foot might get sucked in.

Alexis: Blah! Grrrr! Dah!

A much funnier retort. We also enjoyed saying "Arec Bawdwin" in the style of Team America every time he appeared on screen. He was certainly there for no other purpose as far as I was aware. See? This film is so terrible you have to make your own fun just to survive it. It's a true B-movie that benefits the most from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. The trailer for My Best Friend's Girl is itself a masterpiece of film-making, actually: it manages to sculpt from the sea of unwatchable footage something watchable. You would be forgiven for thinking that the film might have entertainment value, even if it wasn't actually funny. It's like that mountain made from mash potato in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only with shit instead of potato, but the mountain still looks edible. Anyway, the trailer instructed me to "get Tanked" and that phrase served two purposes:

1) It meant that from then onwards my girlfriend would refer to the film as simply Tanked, mainly because of the absurdity of a character whose name is also a verb but also because that's a much better name for what we watched, because

2) It defined the entire film experience.

Little did I know I would get Tanked. A Tanking is supposed to be a traumatic emotional ordeal, an evening of raw psychological abuse after which, in the words of Tank himself, "Your brain will be rocking back and forth in the shower for a month". And that's exactly what this film is. Most importantly, at the end of the evening I hated the party that had subjected me to this Tanking and, like Tank's dates, I never want to see them again. Dane Cook, Kate Hobbeson, Jason Biggs, Jordan Cahan, Alec Baldwin, fucktard director Howard Deutch (more like Howard Douche): if any of you bastards dares to make another film ever again, or even go near a film camera, I will hunt you down and beat you to death with your own legs. To be honest, I would walk fast by security cameras just in case. That goes double for you Kate Hobbeson because you were already in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, you used up your second chance on that. Count yourself lucky.

Right, I have now officially spent more time writing about that perfect shit-storm of a film than it took me to watch it (and probably more time than it took Jor-dan Ca-han to 'write' it). I'm going to have a shower and cry.

P.S. It's only called My Best Friend's Girl and not Tanked because of that song 'My Best Friend's Girl' which they use in the trailer and three times during the film. There should be laws against this sort of thing.

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