Score: 47/100
Score on a par with: 3:10 to Yuma 48/100; Death Proof 50/100; Transformers 51/100; Shooter 53/100; Sunshine 51/100; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 47/100; The History Boys 53/100; Miami Vice 48/100; Superman Returns 53/100; The Dukes of Hazzard 51/100; Cursed 52/100; Matchstick Men 50/100; Jeepers Creepers II 50/100; Bruce Almighty 53/100; The Two Towers 49/100; The Time Machine; K-Pax 53/100; The Count of Monte Cristo 49/100; Planet of the Apes 50/100; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin 52/100; Along Came a Spider 53/100
The major problem with this Simon Pegg vehicle, which is essentially an underdog story, is that there’s not a single character in it for whom one can have any sympathy at all. This is an underdog story I would have put in a sack with some stones and thrown in the canal. Every character in the thing is obnoxious or feckless or incredibly whiney, which means that I for one didn’t want anybody to win (it’s based around a marathon in London, but not the London marathon). Fortunately, the American character’s obnoxiousness out-annoyed Pegg’s character’s fecklessness and so there was someone to root for, if only in a half-hearted fashion. Things did improve a good deal as the film went along, if only because Bernard Black and Dave Angel were in it, and by the end I was quite enjoying it – and, thank God, the ending was plausible and funny, and went a good way to redeeming the incredibly slack first two-thirds of the film.
It was directed by Ross from Friends in an average way interspersed with flashes of aplomb (the charity board scene, with the hilarious Habsburg Syndrome, was very good if not exactly original) and occasional clunks of utter unreality. I did wonder at the time if the London bun shop sequence was supposed to be surreal or whether it was simply terrible (it was, simply, terrible – sort of Chocolat meets Notting Hill meets The Dick Emery Show). On the whole, then, it was a bit of a mixed bag, not terrible but not much good either. If you fancy a comedy race film, watch Clockwise. That’s not been bettered yet.
You barge in here, quite uninvited, break glasses, and then announce, quite casually, that we're all dead.
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