You suck, Fat Boy, you suck (1)

Posted 11 April, 2008 in TV and movies and that

I saw Run, Fatboy, Run a few days ago. Having seen Hot Fuzz and loved it, I was excited about seeing another Simon Pegg joint. David Schwimmer directed this one, and Pegg cowrote the script with Michael Ian Black, whereas Pegg’s other two hits, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, plus the show Spaced, were directed by Brit Edgar Wright and cowritten by Wright and Pegg. Turns out Wright’s absence, and the presence of two Americans, really made a difference - I’m sorry to say this, but Fatboy sucked.

Sure, David Schwimmer’s indie-comedy pedigree is a bit dodgy. He was Ross in Friends, and he directed a whole bunch of Friends episodes too. He was relatively funny as Greenzo in that one episode of 30 Rock, but that was mostly due to Tina Fey’s good writing rather than Schwimmer’s inventive acting. Michael Ian Black, though? He should know better. He was in The State and Reno 911. Plus he played Johnny Blue Jeans in Viva Variety! How could he possibly produce a formulaic, on-the-nose comedic turd like Fatboy? Maybe the usual phalanx of American producers and execs descended upon him and made him rewrite the movie until all its personality was gone. Or maybe it is that he occasionally falls off the good-taste wagon, like he did when he took that recurring role in the abominable TV show Ed.

I am in possession of a (generally useless) MFA in screenwriting, and I sometimes like to play the “three-act game” when I’m watching movies. If a movie’s particularly by-the-numbers, it’ll go like this: The end of the first act comes at around 25-30 minutes into the film. Usually the tension has been set up by then. What does our hero or heroine have to achieve by the end of the movie? When the first act is over, we know the answer to this question. When I think the first act is coming to a conclusion, I check the clock and see if it’s “on time.” This time, I turned to O and said, “I think the first act is now over. Could you pause the movie? It should be right around 25 minutes in.” Indeed it was. If you want to see this movie (don’t do it) and you don’t want to read spoilers (but it really doesn’t matter if you do; the movie is that bad), then please turn away now. When Simon Pegg decides he’s going to run the marathon to win back his ex-fiancee, that’s the end of Act I. Not only is this formulaic, but it’s also preposterous. Dude has three weeks to train for a 26.5-mile race. Plus he smokes. Plus he already left his fiancee once, pregnant at the altar. Why the hell would his running a marathon make her want to go out with him again? I know that comedy often stretches the boundaries of reality, but this is just lazy writing.

The second act is usually twice as long as the first act, or a bit less, depending on the overall length of the movie. The end of the second act is when everything goes seriously pear-shaped for the protagonist. This is when Simon Pegg hits the proverbial wall during the marathon. But wait! It’s not just proverbial! No, Schwimmer has decided to actually film the wall! And then Pegg actually hits it! (If we’re going to start taking metaphors literally here, why not just insert a scene featuring a DVD of Run, Fat Boy, Run being flushed down the toilet? It would be funnier than the whole wall thing.) Meanwhile, as in all comedies of this sort, the protagonist’s supporters and enemies cluster behind him, either cheering or jeering. (O checked the clock again around this point, and we were at about an hour and 15 minutes in - bang on target.) Then - yes! Pegg gets up and hobbles onwards. I’m surprised the script didn’t have him win the marathon - with a movie this far-fetched, almost anything would be possible, including him turning into a giant winged dragon and flying to the finish line. Actually, that would be much more entertaining than what really happens, which is that he falls into his ex-fiancee’s waiting arms at the end of the race.

Again, going on how unbelievable the movie had been thus far, I was amazed to see that in the third act (as long as the first act; denouement; wrapping up of loose ends; usually culminates at about 1 hr 45-2 hrs plus, depending on the length of the film - this one ended at about 1:40), Pegg isn’t actually dating his ex-fiancee again yet. He does, however, ask her out to dinner, in a predictably cringeworthy manner.

Movies can follow the three-act structure and be brilliant - at USC, we studied movies like The Shop Around The Corner and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, whose structures were solid without being constrictive, and whose story points seemed naturally to come at the perfect times, rather than to be scripted according to the clock. It’s still easy to break those movies down and see the skeletons holding them together, but they look like what I imagine Brad Pitt’s skeleton might. Run, Fat Boy, Run’s skeleton, on the other hand, resembles bits of the Elephant Man duct-taped to various dinosaur parts.

What other bits of cliched business can you expect from this movie? There’s a giant pus-filled blister that explodes in someone’s face, even though blisters aren’t often filled with pus - they’re usually filled with lymph, a clear, and far less gross, liquid. But this is just another example of the stellar research job the writers of Fat Boy did. There is falling down stairs. There is a fat dude in skimpy running gear. There is so much Nike product placement that you end up feeling like the company has reached through the screen and groped you. There is a smart-mouthed kid. There is a bare Irish man-bottom. The owner of the aforementioned posterior, actor Dylan Moran, is actually one of the only good things about the movie. (The posterior itself, however, is a tad flat.) Pegg is good, too, but I kept finding myself wondering why the hell he decided to make this film. At one point (midway through Act 3, according to the clock), I also wondered out loud why the hell I was still watching this film.