Sep 4, 2009

[Movies] Run Fatboy Run (2007)

Run Fatboy RunSimon Pegg has developed quite a following amongst geeks given his love for the zombie genre and his many movies involving them. Plus he's a great comedian and character actor and did a pretty amazing job as Scotty in the recent Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams.

Let's face it - the guy is funny and I mean seriously funny, and this is something that transcends an appreciation for British humor. Whether he's hacking up zombies or a town full of violent old people, he's just stellar and that's why we love him!

Apparently it also turns out that he's a close friend of former Friends star David Schwimmer, and thus the reason behind this particular movie being written by Simon but directed by David.

Run Fatboy Run is a romantic comedy centered around Dennis Doyle (Simon Pegg) who discovers that Libby (Thandie Newton), the girl he once left at the altar, was now seeing this high class yuppie of sorts White (Hank Azaria). Thus in order to prove himself to Libby and retain ties with his son Jake, Dennis decides to run in the Nike River Marathon since Whit turns out to be quite the running enthusiast. In order to prepare, Dennis is "coached" by his best friend Gordon (Dylan Moran) and his landlord Mr. Ghosh Dastidar (Harish Patel). Thus the stage is set as Dennis tries to get back into shape while dealing with the fact that Whit eventually ups the ante by proposing to Libby, further dashing Dennis' hopes.

Given that I first watched this as part of a marathon of other Pegg movies, namely Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, I was expecting more laughing-your-head-off-silly comedy and humor. While this movie was still funny, it wasn't THAT kind of funny and I suppose that got me a little disappointed. The whole romantic angle sort of complicated things a bit too much for me and thus all the race preparations just sort of dragged out a bit long for me, thus killing some of the comedy potential.

LOS ANGELES - MARCH 24:  Actor/co-writer Simon...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Acting-wise, the cast was pretty good. I guess it was more about how the characters were written this time around and perhaps to some degree the directorial vision implemented in these movies. The characters were at least witty, but then things didn't go that far beyond that and I was a bit miffed by that.

As much as I ended up struggling with the movie in some points, it did have a nice warm and fuzzy ending, although I don't really see it going very far as a date movie kind of thing like most other mainstream romantic comedies. Set against the other Simon Pegg comedies, this definitely doesn't stand a chance at ranking way up there and perhaps that's because the geek factor in this one is rather low compared to the others.

Run Fatboy Run gets 3.5 marathon runners out of 5.


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