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T O P I C R E V I E W
MguyXXV
Posted - 01/18/2009 : 18:45:12 There are points during this film when Dane Cook sounds like he could be Will Ferrel's identical cousin ("They laugh alike, they walk alike, At times they even talk alike -- you can lose your mind ..."). I'm not saying he's trying to, either. I'm just sayin' ....
I was kind of expecting a manual on assholic seduction. Face it: every guy (who's been paying attention!) knows that chicks fall for assholes so much easier than they do for nice guys -- hence the phrase, "nice guys finish last." It's no mystery: the problem for any decent guy is actually mustering up the guts to be the kind of crass that actually works. (Spoiler: the secret, guys, is not in being an asshole -- it's in having a lot of self-confidence.)
Not so much a manual as an inferential ride along the Hershey Highway, along with gratuitous displays of the asshole craft at its extreme. I can't say I cared about any of the characters at all, which actually works in favor of Dane Cook's portrayal. It's not that I didn't like them, or that I didn't get some enjoyment out of the movie. It's that the movie was a merger of a spoof and a romantic comedy that blended as well as lemon and milk in hot tea (I actually did that once when I first visited England in 1985; my hosts were so kind -- they never once guffawed in my presence). Nowhere in the film is this demonstrated as well as in the final scene between Cook and Kate Hudson, whose performance in that scene was almost as unnatural as anything Drew Barrymore has done since "E.T."
Listen, I'll keep a copy in my guy-file reference pile of guy-stuff amusing films -- along with a bunch of the Will Ferrel stuff I'm collecting (except for "Old School": that sucked!). But I think the lesson here is that the "reformed asshole comedy" is always a spoof. Nothing really new here, just a few good jokes.
"When cousins are two of a kind!"
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MguyXXV
Posted - 01/18/2009 : 21:47:53 More professional opinion here. (Sorry, didn't see it when I posted).