run, fat boy, run

This weekends DVD rentalage was Run, Fat Boy, Run.

It stars Simon Pegg, who was of course the creator of Spaced, the greatest sitcom ever.

He's pretty good in the film. The character he plays is a bit of an odd one, though. At the beginning he leaves his bride-to-be at the altar while she's pregnant.

Now here we have the films first and biggest real problem. Jilting your pregnant wife at the altar makes a humongous shit. A ginormous steaming turd of a man. Reasons are given and on some level they're understandable reasons, but they're not good reasons - that's the problem.

The reason boils down, essentially, to cowardice. Pegg's character needs to grow a pair - and that's the essence of the movie. He redeems himself by becoming a man, essentially. Except, as I say, the thing he did is so utterly appalling this isn't really satisfying.

I think if he'd been in a much worse position, or perhaps if people had acknowledged how big a shit he was a bit more then it would have compensated to some degree.

Anyway, when we pick up with him again he's become an over-weight security guard and his ex-fiancée is in a new relationship with a smarmy American twat. This spurs Pegg's character to enter a marathon - American twat being a marathon runner.

To some extent some of these things start to fall apart when examined to closely - how did ex-fiancée and American twat meet, for example? And how come their relationship is so advanced, yet Pegg hasn't met him before?

Especially since he keeps turning up to see his son. This story element is a mixed blessing - Pegg & son's relationship is screen gold, but it opens up more questions about why and how she let him see her. If Pegg is such a ginormous cowardly shit of a man, how did he have the stones to approach her?

Pegg and ex-fiancée's relationship also seems strangely cordial, given what a gigantic shit he was to her. And what about her family? Or his family?

Anyway, these things could be forgiveable - it's a romantic comedy, so the key elements are romance, which is pretty much there, and comedy, which is kinda there, some of the time.

I mean, there are a lot of good gags in the film, don't get me wrong, it's just they're unevenly paced. You can go twenty minutes without a single chuckle and then there's ten minutes of good belly laughs. And I don't think this is just me not getting the gags - there just aren't any.

Plus some of the gags are pretty much incidental - random funny stuff, that is unrelated to plot or anything else. If they were cut you wouldn't notice them going.

Still, it's an enjoyable enough watch, if you don't dwell too much on the plot holes.

No extras, though.