In his last starring vehicle, the romantic comedy Good Luck Chuck, funnyman Dane Cook played a bachelor afflicted with a curse dictating that any woman who slept with him would find true love with her next boyfriend. Perhaps not surprisingly, it fared poorly at the box office. Undaunted, Cook returns this week with a similarly high-concept romantic comedy, My Best Friend's Girl, and while it's a marked improvement over his previous straight-to-video-caliber effort, it still disappoints.

Cook stars in My Best Friend's Girl as Tank Turner, an unrepentant cad whose skill at offending the opposite sex is so prodigious that he's managed to parlay it into a rather lucrative career, lending his services to desperate men wishing to reunite with their estranged girlfriends. When the unsuspecting women are exposed to the full fury of Tank's vulgarity, they're so traumatized from the experience that they come running back to their exes, desperate to get back together. Tank, essentially, is a professional a--hole.

Enter Tank's best buddy Dustin (Jason Biggs, in a dramatic departure from his previous work), a cloying, socially inept doofus whose clumsy attempt to take his budding relationship with co-worker Alexis (Kate Hudson) "to the next level" goes disastrously wrong. Unable to bear the prospect of losing Alexis, he turns to Tank, who grudgingly agrees to forgo his strict policy of not working with close friends or family in order to help out his lovesick buddy.

But their scheme quickly backfires when feisty Alexis proves a surprisingly worthy adversary for Tank. Their initial bellicosity soon develops into a friendlier, screwball give-and-take, which eventually gives way to full-fledged attraction. Suddenly Tank, Dustin, and Alexis find themselves trapped in an awkward love triangle.

I suspect that your opinion of My Best Friend's Girl will depend largely on your opinion of Cook, since the movie essentially acts as a vehicle for his shtick. The premise is indeed a perfect fit for the comedian's abrasive persona, and fans will no doubt revel in the many opportunities he gets to showcase his caustic brand of humor.

Biggs' character serves mainly as a sounding board for Cook's various comic theories on women and dating. Those of you hoping to see him make love to another dessert pastry will be sorely disappointed. In the role of his romantic foil, Hudson represents a huge upgrade over Good Luck Chuck's Jessica Alba. In fact, she out-classes her male co-stars to such an extent that I almost felt sorry for her. Then I remembered that she was in Fool's Gold, and my pity turned to anger.

Alec Baldwin issues a ho-hum cameo as Tank's father, an outrageously misogynist college professor of -- get this -- women's studies. On the other hand, the surprisingly hot Lizzy Caplan is a treat in the role of Hudson's potty-mouthed roommate, if only because she's surprisingly hot.

In the end, what ultimately sinks My Best Friend's Girl's is its unsuccessful attempt to transition Cook's character from brash, boorish jerk to charming, sensitive good guy -- something that even the esteemed Wedding Crashers struggled to pull off -- in order to make his eventual union with Hudson believable. (Don't act like you didn't see it coming, Spoiler Police.) Meanwhile, Cook's act runs out of gas well before the finish line of a comedy that clocks in at nearly two hours -- a frankly inexcusable length for a movie that should be constitutionally limited to no more than 85 minutes. 

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