Don't think. Just run with it.
Written: Apr 29 '08 (Updated May 02 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: For something so awful, this sure is great.
Cons: For something so great, this sure is awful.
The Bottom Line: Run Fat Boy Run doesn't treat its audience like total shit. Which a) is a nice change, and b) completely explains its failure.
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| headlessparrot's Full Review: Run, Fat Boy, Run |
Depending on how you want to frame things, the 2007 film Run Fat Boy Run is either a much worse or a much better film than it has any right to be. Much worse, both because it stars the unconventionally charming, hysterically funny Simon Pegg – perhaps best known as the star of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but more worthy of worship for his role in the cult UK series Spaced – and because it was written by Pegg with Michael Ian Black, whose own comedy credentials (Stella and The State troupes, Wet Hot American Summer) are not without merit. That the duo’s collaboration resulted in a fairly by-the-numbers romantic comedy is both surprising and disappointing[1]. Much better, because for all its familiarity with (and reliance on) the traditional cues of romantic comedy (the same ones that were gently satirized, ironically enough, in Pegg’s aforementioned “rom-zom-com”), Run Fat Boy Run features enough surprises, enough unexpected laughs, and enough screen chemistry to eke out a pretty compelling film.
I won’t claim that that Run Fat Boy Run is “subtly brilliant,” or “subversive,” or “deceptively intelligent,” because it’s not really any of those things at all. In fact, I have a whole host of issues with it, not the least of which is the whole of its by-the-books romantic comedy framework: it’s all painted a bit too broadly, only a select few characters are really full-formed, and the screenwriting duo of Pegg and Black is just a bit too fascinated by body parts and their corresponding functions. But on the whole, Run Fat Boy Run is more good than bad. It’s funny and it’s sweet – in all the right (read: expected) places – and it maintains enough internal momentum and conviction in its own simulacrum of reality that I was willing to suspend my disbelief for two hours (well, for most of the two hours – more on this later). It’s a film, like many romantic comedies, which toys with your emotions cruelly: shallowly and without remorse. But it does so well, and I’ll admit – cautiously – to being sweetly touched by a surprisingly mild (read: borderline believable) denouement.
Of course, reviewing Run Fat Boy Run leaves me in the uncomfortable position of defending why I even sat through it in the first place. Two reasons: the first is Simon Pegg, whose performances are consistently of the gut-bustingly funny variety. Alternating between dry exasperation, parodic exaggeration, and affable sincerity, Pegg is of an unusual breed: a born star by virtue of his lack of star quality, a fairly middling actor whose very mediocrity is what makes him so instantly appealing. He invites viewers to take him at face value, exuding an awkward, perfectly human charm that bounds recklessly between self-deprecation and boisterous false-confidence. He acts less than he becomes his characters, uninterested in their motivation but completely absorbed by the immediate facts of their false reality. It doesn’t hurt, either, that’s he’s as good – more likely better – a writer as he is a performer. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Spaced (the first two written with Edgar Wright, the latter with Jessica Stevenson) all crackle with wit: thoughtful, smart, and smugly referential, but not self-important, and certainly not above absurdity or potty humour should the opportunity arise. Pegg riffs on genre conventions, but does so with a careful eye that shows a level of affection – and, perhaps more importantly, respect – for his source material[2]; he skewers, but he does so smartly, and he does so gently. Even at their most absurd, his genre parodies are their own stories, convinced of their own importance. They exist in a universe that makes perfect sense, which is why Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz aren’t just great comedies, but great films.
Anyway, the other reason is that – as a few know – I consider myself somewhat of a runner, and I was curious to see how the film actually incorporated running into its story. Now, I know that this is akin to watching the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Sudden Death specifically for its scenes of ice hockey action, but I’m a nerd with a lot of free time. And not surprisingly, Run Fat Boy Run is as much about running as Sudden Death was about hockey; it’s mostly just another situational crutch upon which the romantic comedy narrative can lean.
The story – insofar as there is one – is the cookie-cutter romantic narrative, complete with the requisite tacked-on, ostensibly unrelated premise. Of course, the whole point is that that ostensibly unrelated premise is actually related (gasp!), a point that every romantic comedy sees fit to beat us over the head with. We get it: love is like an endurance race. For other examples of this painfully obvious romantic comedy meme, see You’ve Got Mail (love is like business!), Simply Irresistible (love is like food/cooking!), and countless others. But Run Fat Boy Run, in its defence, actually seems to recognize that this metaphor is a fairly obvious one, and so – thankfully – deigns to leave it mostly unspoken. More to the point: the descriptor ‘cookie-cutter’ is so often used pejoratively in criticism, but applying it too liberally reflects (I think) a misinterpretation of its meaning. If we extend the metaphor, it’s worth pointing out that cookie cutters are used to make cookies. And cookies are – though admittedly not always – pretty delicious; calorically empty, and macronutrient-deprived perhaps, but still pretty tasty. Run Fat Boy Run, as far as I’m concerned – embodies the dual nature of this extended metaphor.
Pegg, in any event, stars as Dennis Doyle, an overweight underachiever who – five years ago – literally ran off on his pregnant fiancé moments before the wedding. As the film picks up, Doyle is going nowhere: he’s a security guard in a shopping boutique, and barely able to cover the rent on his basement apartment. Due to shared custody of their child (the only character with whom Dennis’ interactions aren’t awkward and forced), Dennis sees his ex-fiancé (Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Odell, played by Thandie Newton) regularly – and the truth is that he still pines for her. So when he finds out that she’s dating Whit (Hank Azaria), a successful, athletic American, too good to be true, he takes it upon himself to win back Libby’s hand. Whit, as it turns out, fancies himself a marathoner, and Dennis decides that running a marathon himself (the Nike River Run[3], a fictional marathon used because the filmic rights to the actual London Marathon had been taken) is just the symbolic act he needs to win back Libby. He ran out of her life, in other words, and spends most of this film trying to run back in. But Run Fat Boy Run takes a few detours – some of them rather haphazardly – on its way to the finish line, incorporating the requisite cast of zany characters. There’s Gordon (Dylan Moran, also from Shaun of the Dead), who makes a bet for all he’s worth that Dennis will finish the race, and there’s Maya (India de Beaufort), the daughter of Dennis’ landlord (Mr. Goshdashtidar, played by Harish Patel; as you can imagine, his name is played unrelentingly for comedic value – har har), who threatens him with eviction should he fail to finish the race. Does it all sound familiar? It should. And when it all comes together, Run Fat Boy Run wraps itself up – like you might expect – in a neat little package of romantic comedy convention.
Run Fat Boy Run marks the feature-film directorial debut of Friend David Schwimmer, who – as you might expect – brings a breezy sitcom sensibility to the film’s visual style: bright colours, lots of laughs, small digestible chunks of amusement and/or emotion. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about his aesthetic decisions, but nor is there anything objectionable (an important balcony scene is marred by obviously dubbed dialogue, but I’m not going to fault Schwimmer for this). The camera is – with one exception – a quiet observer, mostly uninvested in the action; merely a steady, reliable companion who shows things as they are. That lone exception, however, is a noteworthy one. Whether it was conceived of by Pegg or Black or Schwimmer, Run Fat Boy Run’s visual representation of hitting the wall – the point when glycogen stores in the bodies of endurance athletes become depleted, resulting in extreme fatigue and significant performance drop – is visually stunning, if not wholly unique: literally a brick wall, ten feet high and running the entire width of the race track, surrounded in darkness and foreboding silence. Pushing on involves tearing down the wall, brick by agonizing brick.
The film’s relative success, I think, can be credited to two things: one is the wry, distinctly British snark of its script, which is consistently amusing, and at times quite (though quietly) hilarious. Pegg has a way of writing dick, fart, and bodily fluid jokes that seem sly, and – dare I say – intelligent. The other is the dual performances of Pegg and Newton in Run Fat Boy Run’s lead roles. Pegg is his usual self, playing Dennis with a perfect mix of desperation, complacency, and dry charm: virtually ripped from the pages of (as I think another reviewer has suggested) a Nick Hornby novel, Pegg’s Dennis is in a state of perpetual adolescence – but it’s an agonizing adolescence that even he wishes he could escape. Pegg, essentially, plays High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon better than John Cusack did (and I loved High Fidelity), though he’s cramped inside a considerably more limiting premise. Dennis is a disaster, but a compelling, and sympathetic disaster; well-meaning, but mostly inept. And if the writers (or Pegg’s performance) deserve credit for anything, it’s for finding a way to make Dennis – a character who bailed on his pregnant fiancé – sympathetic. When he speaks to Libby about the incident, he says, “I did a stupid, stupid thing. But it was only because I thought spoiling your day was better than ruining your life.” His justification doesn’t change the fact that he acted like an asshole, but at least he acted as a well-meaning and selfless asshole. Given the tragicomic trajectory of Dennis life, too, it’s a pretty poignant – and pretty plausible – glimpse into the psyche of a self-defeating mind.
Thandie Newton is great as Pegg’s foil; she’s obviously frantic somewhere deep down, but even-tempered on the surface, and played with a believability that’s often lacking in female romantic leads. She lacks the drop dead, stereotypical gorgeousness of Hollywood actresses, but is all the more striking for her believable good looks. Her ambivalence toward Dennis is clear, but so are her reservations toward Whit – it’s a balancing act that she handles wonderfully, and with a grace that has grudgingly embraced the disasters that shaped her life.
But it’s a balancing act that falls apart once audiences move beyond the film’s leads. As Pegg and Newton go, so does Run Fat Boy Run. The rest of its characters are cardboard cut-outs, unceremoniously dropped into a slot to fill the required role: Dennis and Libby’s five-year old son is less a character than a plot point (not surprising, since the whole film, whether it knows it or not, actually hinges on his existence), and while Dylan Moran’s Gordon – Dennis’ best (only?) friend, a well-meaning but self-destructive hedonist – is likeable, and generally responsible for most of the film’s biggest guffaws (“The only serious relationship I've been in ended in a broken collarbone and a dead meerkat” and “That’s the second most disgusting fluid I’ve had in my eye”), it’s never clear why he does anything that he does. Unless his lecherousness is its own justification (which I suppose is believable to a degree), Gordon’s bare-assed (literally) exploits and compulsive gambling exist only to exasperate or invigorate Dennis as the script requires. Still, the chemistry between Pegg and Moran is natural enough that I’m alright with accepting the character of Gordon at face value.
My most visceral frustration, however, is directed toward Azaria’s Whit – actually, less toward Azaria himself (who does what he can with what he’s been given, and whose interaction with Pegg is still quite well played) than toward Pegg and Black in writing his character. Small detail that speaks volumes: they never even give him a last name! It’s a self-evident truth in romantic comedy that “too good to be true” is just that, and Whit is no exception. But Whit’s biggest problem is that by the end of the Run Fat Boy Run, he has devolved from a decent, if somewhat overenthusiastic rival, into a caricature of supervillain proportions: a raving madman who reacts violently in the face of adversity, yells at children, and is an all-around douchebag. There are some cracks in Whit’s shining armour early on, but none so glaring as to make this devilish transformation even remotely believable. The filmmakers weren’t content to let Dennis “win” on his own terms; they had to stack the deck in his favour. And by doing so, they made his victory – ironically – a lot less compelling than it should have been. Run Fat Boy Run works so hard to make Dennis sympathetic in spite of his grievous mistakes, and then makes him the good guy purely by default anyway. Unfortunately, the movie’s story arc leans so heavily on this transformation that it would be treading water without it. Yet it runs contrary to everything Pegg has shown us in his other films. As I mentioned previously, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz work because – however absurd they seem from a distance – they are so sincerely invested in the logic of their own universe. They embrace absurdity with gleeful abandon. Run Fat Boy Run falters because even it can’t believe this sudden shift; it merely recognizes its necessity, and so politely asks the audience to “bear with us now.” The respect it has for its audience makes this even more disappointing. In a film that is so interested otherwise in retaining the hues of reality (see its final moments, which are less romantic than they are simply optimistic), this is a jarring and stupid way out of a narrative jam.
I have other issues with Run Fat Boy Run, but they’re pretty trivial. It’s implausible that the action should take place over the course of three weeks, for example. No one can train themselves for a marathon in three weeks, and the progression of Libby and Whit’s relationship seems pretty forced under this timeframe. And some of the film’s forays into blue humour feel tacked on for their own sake (they’re jokes at which I laughed, but hated myself for doing so). But for the most part, Run Fat Boy Run is a pretty good example of putting a cookie-cutter to pretty good use: making tasty cookies. Odds are that you’ll have figured out how it ends before it even gets going. There are, however, a few pleasant surprises in how it ultimately gets to its fated destination.
I enjoyed Run Fat Boy Run. More importantly, I didn’t feel bad about enjoying it. Its very purpose (not to mention its disastrous US box office returns) assures that it will soon be lost in the catalogue of Simon Pegg, but I don’t think it deserves to be – at least not entirely. Run Fat Boy Run won’t do what Shaun of the Dead did for zombie movies, or what Hot Fuzz did for action films, but it isn’t intended to. It’s simply a fun little excursion, funny, charming and perfectly nice: the filmic equivalent of a master satirist trying his hand (earnestly) at Harlequin Romance.
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[1] – Less surprising after discovering that Michael Ian Black also penned the similarly by-the-books (direct-to-video) romantic comedy Wedding Daze in 2006.
[2] – When Nick Frost’s character, in Hot Fuzz, reacts to the infamous Keanu Reeves-screams-and-shoots-into-the-sky scene from Point Break; it is made abundantly clear that we’re going to see something similar later on in the film. And we certainly do, but Pegg and Wright’s scripting of it is really something special: straddling the thin line between good-natured parody and outright mockery, Pegg and Frost manage to play the scene for both referential laughs and surprising pathos. Sadly, Nick Frost is noticeably absent from Run Fat Boy Run.
[3] – In keeping with the name of the marathon, Run Fat Boy Run also functions as a two-hour Nike advertisement. I’m inclined to forgive this egregious use of product placement; at least it allowed the filmmakers to lend some legitimacy to their fictional race.
Recommended:
Yes
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headlessparrot
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Member: Bryan Jansen
Location: Ontario, Canada
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